On March 28, an adviser to the Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol stated in his telegram channel that the identity of the military man who gave orders and controlled the bombing of the Drama Theater, maternity hospital and children's hospital in the city had been established.
According to him, soon after the bombing of Mariupol, the Ukrainian side established that the planes took off from the Primorsko-Akhtarsk airfield in the Krasnodar Territory. In March, the Ukrainian hacker group Cyber Resistance released information about a unit of the 960th Attack Aviation Regiment located there. Hackers hacked the email of the unit commander, Colonel Sergei Atroshchenko - originally from the Zhitomir region, by the way - and his wife, collected data about him, his subordinates, their families for several months and made his contacts, address and other details publicly available.
As Ukrainian publications write, the hackers “also gained access to the e-mail of Atroshchenko’s wife Lilia and entered into correspondence with her on behalf of one of the officers of the 960th regiment, which is headed by her husband. On behalf of the officer, Ukrainian hacktivists convinced Liliya to do a “patriotic photo shoot” of the wives of real regiment officers at the airfield in ceremonial jackets with their husbands’ medals.”
The hackers transferred all the information to the international intelligence community InformNapalm, and they, in turn, sent it to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to issue a warrant against Atroshchenko and the pilots of his unit.
Mariupol, a city in the Donetsk region, on the shores of the Azov Sea, was under siege from February to the end of April 2022. As a result of shelling by Russian troops in the city, according to UN estimates, up to 90% of multi-storey buildings and up to 60% of private houses were damaged or destroyed. According to Ukrainian authorities, at least 25 thousand people died in the battles for Mariupol.
One of the most tragic pages in the history of the siege is the explosion on March 16 at the Drama Theater, where people were hiding from shelling. Ukrainian authorities said an aerial bomb was dropped on the theater. The Russian side claims that the theater building was mined and blown up by soldiers of the Ukrainian Azov regiment. According to various estimates, from 300 to 600 civilians died in the theater.
On March 17, 2023, Vladimir Putin signed a decree conferring the honorary title “Guards” on the 960th Assault Aviation Regiment. As stated in the decree, the personnel of the regiment showed heroism “in military operations to protect the Fatherland and state interests in armed conflicts.”