Fifty-one people, including a child, were killed on Thursday October 5 by a Russian strike in Hroza, a small village in eastern Ukraine, on the sidelines of a funeral. The bombing, carried out using an Iskander ballistic missile according to preliminary data, completely destroyed a store and a cafe located in the same building when around sixty people were there, said the Minister of Defense. inside, Ihor Klymenko, on national television.
“There were villagers in the store and villagers in the cafe were also gathered” for a reception after a villager’s funeral, Mr. Klymenko said, adding that Hroza had 330 residents.
According to a spokesperson for the regional prosecutor’s office cited by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency, Dmytro Tchoubenko, these funerals were those of a Ukrainian soldier who died in combat, whose son, also a soldier, and wife perished in the bombing. on Thursday.
The strike took place around 1:15 p.m. local time on this village about thirty kilometers west of Kupiansk, said regional governor Oleh Synehoubov. According to him, this is the deadliest attack in the region of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022. He declared three days of mourning.
“Russian atrocities reach an even more sinister level”
Russian forces seized large swaths of this province from the first days of the invasion. Ukrainian troops then liberated almost the entire Kharkiv region during a lightning assault in the fall of 2022, but it is regularly subject to strikes.
Russia is currently leading an offensive in the Kupiansk area to try to regain ground and hinder the Ukrainian counter-offensive underway in the east and south to liberate the territories occupied by Moscow.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, currently in Spain for a meeting with European leaders, denounced to the press an “inhumane terrorist attack”. With the “bloody” attack on Groza, “Russian atrocities reach an even more sinister level”, reacted, for his part, the head of diplomacy of the European Union, Josep Borrell, on X (ex-Twitter).
The White House spokesperson called it a “terrible” act. “We must continue to support the Ukrainian people because this is the terrible reality in which they live” on a daily basis, added Karine Jean-Pierre, at a time when President Joe Biden is trying to obtain additional funds from Congress to help Ukraine. This demonstrates “the level of depravity to which Russian forces are prepared to stoop,” commented British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
“It is possible to protect people against such attacks (…) only with the help of anti-aircraft defense,” said Mr. Zelensky, who spoke of the delivery to Ukraine of a new American Patriot system during a meeting with the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz. “We will have more air defense – the agreements are clear. This is very important before winter. Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain – thank you! “, he then insisted in the evening.
