Russia committed a new war crime this Thursday by bombing a food distribution center that served as a cafeteria in Groza, a town in the Kupiansk district, liberated from Z troops last fall. The attack currently leaves 51 civilians dead (including a six-year-old child) and six injured.
The area, which has already been hit hard by the Russian invasion, has lost a good part of its population, forced to flee or taking refuge in basements. Many of them only go out to buy food in the few stores that are still open. The Russians have set the objective of their attack today on one of them. Since its bombings in rebellious Syria, attacks on bread queues have become a common strategy of the Moscow regime to cause the flight of civilians, demoralization and terror of the population.
The weaponry used is the usual S300 missile, an anti-aircraft projectile of enormous destructive power that Russia uses ballistically against ground targets. In cities near the front, it is used daily by Russia, which has a large stock of this type of Soviet-era weapons.
The battle front, which is located a few kilometers beyond the city of Kupiansk, has forced the evacuation of several towns near the fighting, since bombings of markets, churches or restaurants are the order of the day by Moscow. .
The bombing victims were attending a ceremony in honor of a deceased villager, Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said: “There were civilians in the store and in the [nearby] cafe, gathered for a ceremony in memory of a deceased villager.”
“A clearly brutal crime by Russia, a missile attack against a food store, a totally deliberate act of terrorism,” Zelensky wrote on his Telegram account, where he published an image of the result of the attack, from Granada.
The Ukrainian president recalled that he is in talks with several European leaders to reinforce Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses, still very scarce in certain areas of the front, and to be able to better protect their towns and cities from attacks like the one this Thursday.
“We must stop Russian terror,” added Zelensky, who described as “criminals” “all those who help Russia circumvent the sanctions” that prevent it from importing missile parts and other goods it uses to produce weapons.
The problem is that these areas are so close to the line of contact between Russians and Ukrainians that it is not easy to prevent an attack like this. From the moment the missile is launched until it hits, only a few seconds pass in which there is no time to activate the alarms or try to shoot it down. The Ukrainian civilian population is sold on these projectiles.
