At least 51 people died after a rocket hit the city of Hroza in eastern Ukraine on Thursday afternoon. The country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement on Telegram that Russia was responsible for the attack, which targeted a grocery store near which the victims were located, according to the president. This is currently the second worst massacre of civilians during the war after the April 2022 Russian missile attack on Kramatorsk train station, which left 61 people dead and 121 injured.
Images from the crime scene shared by Ukrainian authorities show scores of civilian bodies being recovered from the rubble. The victims were people who were near the store and in a neighboring restaurant. Interior Minister Igor Klimenko said that the reason for the high number of victims was that participants in a funeral had gathered in this restaurant. “A representative of every family in the city was present at the funeral,” an Interior Ministry spokesman said. Some residents of the area sent El PAÍS images of scores of civilian bodies scattered on the street and in flowerbeds.
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Both Zelensky and his top presidential adviser, Andriy Yermak, have not hesitated to blame Russian artillery for the atrocity. “Russian terror must be stopped. Anyone who supports Russia to avoid sanctions are criminals. “Anyone who supports Russia supports evil.” According to Hroza City Council sources consulted by this newspaper, there were no military targets near the site of the attack. “The terrorists deliberately attacked during their lunch break to ensure the highest possible death toll. “There were no military targets there,” the Ukrainian Defense Ministry wrote in a statement.
Klimenko, appearing on Ukrainian state television, added that the attack was highly targeted at the funeral service and that intelligence services were investigating the possibility that an informant of the intruder provided the coordinates. The reason why the funeral could have been targeted is not yet clear, but the Ukrainian Defense Ministry assures that it was an attack to “scare Ukrainians.” The Kharkiv prosecutor’s office is investigating what kind of weapons caused the massacre.
“It was a proven Russian attack,” Zelensky said. These words can be interpreted as a veiled allusion to the doubts that arose about the causes of death of 16 civilians and more than 30 wounded on September 6 in Kostiantinivka, Donetsk province. Kostiantinvka is only 10 kilometers from the front line. Hroza is located 30 kilometers from the zero line of the Battle of Kupyansk. Ukrainian authorities believed that a massacre in Kostyantinivka was carried out by a Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missile modified to attack ground targets. A New York Times investigation concluded on September 19 that the disaster was actually caused by the failure of a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile.
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Hroza is located in Kharkiv province, in the rear of the Kupiansk war front. This line of war is the only one in which Russia acts with an offensive will, with a huge amount of artillery and drones. The Russian objective is to distract Ukrainian forces from the main front of the counteroffensive, Zaporizhzhia, and also to deprive Ukrainian forces of any opportunity to advance into the neighboring province of Luhansk. The Kremlin controls Luhansk almost entirely and its troops were expelled from virtually all of Kharkiv province in September 2022.
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