Visual Investigation into the Attack on the Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine

Project lead for Amnesty International’s visual and spatial investigation into the Russian air strike that destroyed the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theatre in Mariupol on 16 March 2022.

At the time of the attack, hundreds of civilians were in and around the theatre; many were killed. The theatre was clearly recognisable as a civilian object, perhaps more so than any other location in the city. The evidence Amnesty International gathered demonstrated that the attack was a war crime.

Disinformation online and a lack of access to the site of the attack made it difficult, first, to obtain evidence and, second, to communicate the organisation’s findings. During its investigation, Amnesty International’s researchers spoke to 53 witnesses as well as experts in physics, weapons, and satellite imagery. They also conducted extensive open source research. Our visual investigation used 3D modelling to organise this diverse evidence base in space and time.

A video of the 3D model was created to communicate the organisation’s layered and sometimes technical findings to a general audience. For the investigation team, the reconstruction revealed new relationships between evidence, such as the positive correlation between the locations of interviewed survivors at the time of the attack and the areas of the theatre that experts estimate were the least severely damaged.

The video was published on 30 June 2022 to accompany an in-depth report.