Officials posted images that appeared to show the once gleaming, whitewashed three-storey theatre, hollowed out and ablaze, with bricks and scaffolding piled high.
A theatre housing over one thousand people has been reportedly bombed by Russia, according to Ukrainian officials.
The sad incident happened on Thursday.
According to the report by AFP, Russia had destroyed the theatre harbouring more than a thousand people in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, with the toll yet unknown.
Officials posted images that appeared to show the once gleaming, whitewashed three-storey theatre, hollowed out and ablaze, with bricks and scaffolding piled high.
“The invaders destroyed the Drama Theatre. A place where more than a thousand people found refuge. We will never forgive this,” the Mariupol City Council said in a Telegram post.
Days before the apparent attack, satellite images shared by a private company, Maxar, clearly showed children or Russian etched out in the ground on either side of the building.
Mariupol Mayor, Vadym Boichenko, called the attack a “horrifying tragedy.”
“People were hiding there, and some said they were lucky to survive, but unfortunately not all were lucky,” he said in a video message.
“The only word to describe what has happened today is genocide, genocide of our nation, our Ukrainian people. But I am confident that the day will come when our beautiful city of Mariupol will rise out of the ruins again, ” he added.
Ukrainian officials branded the bombing a war crime.
“It is impossible to find words to describe the level of cynicism and cruelty, with which Russian invaders are destroying peaceful residents of a Ukrainian city by the sea,” an official statement read.
An advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, decried Russia’s “cruelty” and ridiculed those in the West who rejected the idea of a no-fly zone for “fear of World War 3” with Russia, as they sat “in a Berlin cafe.”
Russia’s defence ministry denied that its forces bombed the city and stated that the building was destroyed in an explosion set off by Ukraine’s nationalist Azov battalion.