Surrounding the theatre and once lush parkland in the heart of Mariupol, is Peace Avenue, a tree-lined road connecting the outer suburbs in the east and west to the city's cultural centre.
But that was before the invasion of Ukraine. Almost three months on from the Russian army's brutal siege, Peace Avenue has been transformed into a hellscape.
The theatre, which became a sanctuary for Mariupol residents, was obliterated in a missile strike killing hundreds of civilians taking shelter inside.
Trees are charred, rubble lines the streets and shell craters pockmark the landscape.
As for the buildings, Frank Ledwidge — a former reserve military intelligence officer in the British army and a military strategy expert — likened what remained to "hundreds of rows of smashed teeth".
A UN building damage assessment of Mariupol analysed satellite images captured on March 14.
It found just a handful of buildings in the city centre area had been damaged at that time.
An ABC News analysis of more recent satellite imagery, from April 3, reveals visible damage to almost every building here.
In April, the UN published a rapid damage assessment of the city. The report divided the city into a grid of 500 x 500-metre cells, and it used satellite imagery to evaluate whether or not there were damaged buildings inside each cell.
Over the built-up areas of the city, it found damage in almost every cell.
The centuries-old port city of Mariupol — which, before the invasion, was home to more than 400,000 people — has been all but wiped from the map.
Homes and shops turned into vantage points and hideouts. Paddocks converted into mass graves. More than 20,000 civilians are feared to have been killed in the fighting.
Families who fled the city have described their homes being bombed as indiscriminately as the military posts that were defending the city.
One of those homes belonged to Aleksander, a Mariupol resident who didn't want his real name used in this story.
Since leaving the besieged city, he's spent what money he had left on petrol trying to rescue and evacuate his fellow Ukrainians.
Dodging bullets and shells, Aleksander says he has transported as many as 1,000 people since the fighting began.
"I do it because I am a human and not an animal," he tells ABC News via audio message from Mariupol.
After almost three months of fighting, the city is now under the control of the Russian army.
The battle for Mariupol saw some of the most-destructive fighting of the invasion, a tragic by-product of the city's strategic importance.
For Moscow, capturing the city meant freeing up troops and opening up an unimpeded land corridor between Crimea and the eastern region of Donbas, where its military efforts are now focused.
For the Ukrainians, their ability to slow the advance of invading forces and inflict heavy casualties on them became a source of national pride and a touchstone for resistance across the country.
The battle ended with Ukrainian forces holed up in the city's Azovstal steel works.
After weeks of heavy bombing and attempts by the Kremlin to starve out the remaining fighters, the Ukrainian government ordered an end to the defence of the city.
Now that fighting has eased, some locals, such as Aleksander, have been able to return to what's left of their homes.
As Aleksander walked around his neighbourhood, he took a video for the ABC: It's a scene of utter despair.
The muddied streets, littered with debris and rubble, look as though they have been turned inside out.
At the end of the courtyard, just opposite a children's music school, fire smoulders inside a group of flats.
Outside his house, a massive crater defiles the streetscape.
"This is f****d up, so f****d up," he says, as he narrates the video.
Amid all the chaos, there's an old Soviet-era car, a GAZ Volga M21, sitting relatively unscathed in the middle of the street.
"Do you remember it used to be here all the time [before the war]?" he says to someone off camera.
For the millions of displaced Ukrainians forced to flee their home towns, it is an all-too-familiar story.
In cities such as Kharkiv, in north-eastern Ukraine, fighting raged for months on end.
Witness accounts, satellite data, as well as photos and videos posted on social media paint a bleak picture of what remains of the city.
On the outskirts of Kyiv, where Russian forces withdrew in April, there are disturbing signs of civilians being tortured and murdered.
Building damage reports by the UN Satellite Centre — which likely underestimate the true scale of destruction — show that more than a fifth of the buildings surveyed across the towns of Bucha, Irpin, Vorzel and Hostomel, sustained visible damage.
The extent of the damage is almost unimaginable but, for military observers like Mr Ledwidge, it was not unexpected.
That is because he has seen it all before: shelling cities and terrorising the civilian population is a tactic lifted directly from the Kremlin military playbook.
"It's not simple viciousness. It is simple viciousness with a purpose," Mr Ledwidge said.
"It's to deliver the message, in extremely violent terms, that we have control over you.
"There's nothing you can do about it, we can get you anywhere."
It was a tactic used by the Russian army as it levelled eastern European cities on their way to Berlin in World War II.
It was again employed in Chechnya in the 1990s, in a bid to crush a rebel independence movement that had formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Russian forces pummelled the capital Grozny to the ground, killing tens of thousands of civilians in the process.
The tactic was further refined when Moscow became involved in the Syrian civil war in 2015.
It used its military power to help prop up the regime of Bashar al Assad, whose dictatorship was facing collapse at the hands of opposition forces.
In response, the Russian army unleashed a wave of ruthless bombing campaigns on rebel-held territory.
In Aleppo, huge areas of the city were wiped out.
Medical facilities, schools and markets were shelled and civilians were indiscriminately killed or brutalised into submission.
The UN described conditions in the worst-hit parts of the city as the "apex of horror".
It became known as the "Syria playbook" and it wasn't long before strikingly similar tactics were being unleashed on the Ukrainian population.
A timeline to destruction
In the opening days of Ukraine's invasion, as Russian forces began pouring over the border into its neighbour's territory, Moscow was adamant that it would not be targeting cities and its invasion posed "no threat to [the] civilian population".
Those assurances were based on Russian president Vladimir Putin's vision of a swift and decisive victory in Ukraine. Things, of course, did not go as planned.
Instead of encircling and overrunning cities, the Russians were plagued by organisational and tactical failures.
They had also severely underestimated their opposition.
Putin was left "angry and frustrated", according to CIA director William J. Burns, who told the US House Intelligence Committee on March 8 that, as a result, the invasion could turn "ugly".
"[Putin]'s likely to double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties," he said.
His predictions proved on the mark and Putin's change in strategy had devastating consequences on the ground.
French company Masae Analytics used Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data captured by European Union satellites, to detect damage to buildings in Ukraine.
SAR bounces microwave pulses off the Earth's surface, the signal returned to the satellite is decoded to map the physical properties below.
Masae Analytics used this data to detect damage to buildings in the cities of Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol.
The footprint of war is evident in almost every corner of these cities: Industrial sites and shops are among the damaged buildings as are homes, schools and hospitals.
By calculating where the damage overlaps with open-source building footprints, an ABC News analysis found that on April 29 in Chernihiv, almost 43 per cent — or 3,098 buildings within the city's limits — had sustained some level of damage.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, 46 per cent of its buildings had been damaged.
But it is in Mariupol where the greatest proportion of damage has been identified.
More than half of the buildings there have been damaged or destroyed.
The true scale of the damage is likely much higher as the analysis relied on visibly incomplete building footprint data from OpenStreetMaps. Some estimates put the total damage in Mariupol closer to 95 per cent.
"The Russian military high command is desperate to give Putin success. And that means they'll literally do anything, including killing civilians and destroying their cities to do that," said Mick Ryan, a retired major general who served in the Australian Defence Force for more than three decades.
Mr Ryan says nowhere has that been more evident than in Mariupol.
"It has been a festering sore in their side that they've sought to remove," he said.
Both Mr Ryan and Mr Ledwidge say that the brutal tactics witnessed to date in the invasion of Ukraine are likely to be reused as the Russians seek to claim territory in eastern Ukraine.
Comments from Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of Luhansk province, suggest that may already be occurring.
"I don't even want to speak about what's happening with the people living in Popasna, Rubizhne and Novotoshkivske right now," he told reporters. "These cities simply don't exist anymore. They [the Russians] have completely destroyed them," he said.
In his hometown of Mariupol, Aleksander has seen and experienced firsthand the emotional toll of returning to a house in ruin.
"People's reactions are different. Someone cries looking at their house, someone understands that you can't live here anymore, someone comes back and tries to restore everything with their hands," he said.
Given the lack of basic necessities in many cities across war-torn Ukraine, the thought of rebuilding is a seemingly insurmountable task.
Aleksander can barely fathom how long it would take to restore his once-prosperous city. He thinks 20 years, at the bare minimum, but he suspects it could be much, much longer.
"The maximum? I can't even imagine," he said.
Notes about this story:
Satellite images in the opening sequence were sourced from Google and Maxar. The image from April 3 was supplied by Planet Labs. The building footprints were sourced from OpenStreetMap. The damage analysis of the city centre compared imagery from 2020 to April 7, 2022.
Credits
Reporting, mapping, 3D modelling: Mark Doman
Development: Thomas Brettell
Additional reporting: Emily Clark
