A woman who survived the bombing of a theatre in Mariupol has said she believes the panic of the crowd rushing to escape killed more people than the strike itself.

The building sheltering more than a thousand civilians in the besieged southern Ukrainian city was bombed by Russia on 16 March.

The blast killed around 300 people, authorities in the country have said – which would make it the war’s deadliest attack on civilians.

Mariupol resident Maria Radionova, 27, who was among those who made it out alive, has told of the chaos as the bomb hit.

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“There was general panic,” she said. “People were running, people were pushing.

“I didn’t go down into the bomb shelter itself but I’m convinced that many people died there not only from the missile but also from panic because when people were getting out, no one was watching if someone needs to be let through, and I’m sure this crowd killed more people than the strike itself.”

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‘People were running, people were screaming’

Mariupol, a strategically located port city, has been under attack for almost the entire war. For days, authorities were unable to say how many had died in the attack on the Mariupol Drama Theatre.

In an attempt to ward off an attack on the building, which was being used as a shelter, the word “CHILDREN” was printed in Russian in huge white letters on the ground outside.

Sky News has been told that pregnant women who had been rescued from a bombed maternity hospital nearby had been moved to the theatre for safety.

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Ms Radionova, who was standing at the entrance to the theatre at the time of the attack, said she saw separated parents and children desperate to find each other.

“There was a huge commotion,” she said. “People were running, people were screaming, calling their parents, children were lost, children were looking for their mothers. Those who could took the children away and tried to calm them down, saying ‘we’ll find your mother’.”

She said she did not realise what had happened at first, and was helped by a man who was standing nearby.

“In one moment I just heard a whistle and then the man standing behind me grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and made me bend down and then pushed me against the wall and covered me with his body. And debris was falling on us, bricks and pieces of the wall…

“I saw from the stairs a man was blown away probably from the blast and he fell facedown on the (shattered) glass. Nearby there was an injured woman in a puddle of blood and this woman was trying to wake him up and she was pressing his face against the glass.”

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Ms Radionova, who lost two dogs in the attack, is now sheltering with friends in the city of Zaporizhzhia.

Mariupol has been devastated by weeks of Russian fire.

In an address on Saturday to Qatar’s Doha Forum, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy compared the destruction of the city to the destruction inflicted on the Syrian city of Aleppo by combined Syrian and Russian forces in the civil war.

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More than 100,000 people still need to be evacuated from Mariupol, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on Saturday.

The bloodshed in the city has fuelled allegations that Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine.

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