Two excavators and a dozen workers with chainsaws and hoes expanded the cemetery area in the Ukrainian village of Hroza this Friday against time. The cemetery will double in size to accommodate the remains of 52 of its neighbors killed by a Russian missile on Thursday. The tragedy is particularly painful because the attack killed half of the residents of this city in Kharkiv province in the east of the country. The United Nations human rights office in Ukraine believes it was a deliberate bombing and is investigating it as a war crime. This Friday, a day after the Hroza massacre, Russia attacked several municipalities in the same province with rockets, including the capital, leaving two people dead and about thirty people injured.
Tatiana Buks cannot remember an expression of so much pain concentrated in one and the same place so far during the war. Buks is head of the psychologist team at Proliska, an NGO that supports Hroza survivors under the auspices of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). She was involved in the largest massacre of civilians during the invasion so far, in April 2022, the bombing of the Kramatorsk train station, also by the Russian army, in which more than 60 people lost their lives. “But Kramatorsk is a city, and there were people from all over Donetsk province at the train station,” says Buks. “This is a city that had just over 300 inhabitants before the war, and now there are just a few more. 100.” ″.
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Other neighbors interviewed by this newspaper confirm that within seconds Hroza found himself without half of his neighbors. Many of the survivors stroll the streets with no direction in mind and are still in shock. A couple and their two daughters sit wordlessly on a bench in front of their house. “See the house next to ours? “They all died,” says the mother, sobbing. The data and testimonies collected by EL PAÍS in Hroza confirm that a Russian precision attack deliberately took their lives.
After 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, a rocket hit a community compound that also served as a restaurant and cafeteria. The Kharkiv provincial prosecutor’s office said the weapon used was an Iskander ballistic missile, known for its supersonic speed and enormous explosive payload. A luncheon was held in this dining room in memory of soldier Andrii Kozir, who died in battle in Dnipro province on March 29, 2022. His son Denis asked for the exhumation of his father’s remains, which were in Dnipro, according to sources from the Hroza town hall, so that he should be buried in his hometown. After the funeral, a brotherhood dinner was organized on Thursday to bid farewell to this well-known son of the community. Ukrainian prosecutors suspect that a Russian collaborator in the area provided the coordinates of the meeting point so that it could be attacked. Denis Kozir and the rest of his family were also killed.
A woman lays flowers at the site of the attack on Hroza in the Kharkiv region. THOMAS PETER (Portal)
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“The Russians must have believed that there were senior army personnel present at the funeral, but the truth is that there were none. “All the dead are residents of the city,” says Volodimir Shudravii, head of infrastructure at the Hroza municipal council. Shudravii coordinates the rehabilitation of damaged buildings and support to the emergency services on site. National Guard members use dogs to search the area to find evidence of the crime. Beneath the rubble of the bombed building, firefighters carefully pick up debris to remove victims’ remains that could be used for DNA identification tests. They place fingers, limbs and seemingly charred pieces of flesh on towels and plastic sheeting.
A precise hit
Shudravii also believes that the information was provided to the enemy by a collaborator. “The hit was so precise, right in the middle of the building where they were eating.” Kharkiv, like the rest of eastern Ukraine, is one of the regions where historically a larger part of the population is close to Russian culture and identity. A military unit stationed in Hroza explains to EL PAÍS that it is very unlikely that the intruder would have obtained the information about the funeral with spy drones like the Orlan, since they are not that far from the combat areas – the village is located 32 kilometers from the Kupiansk War Front removed. As in most villages in the hinterland, soldiers in Hroza are housed in now empty houses. Another possible hypothesis is that the Russian army mistook the funeral for a military meeting.
Grave of Andriy Kozir, the soldier, whose burial in Hrozar. Cristian Segura took place
The rocket hit the northeast facade of the building, so it came from the direction in which Russia or the Russian-occupied areas in Luhansk province are located. That the attack was a Russian attack was “provable,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky emphasized on Thursday, a detail that the press interpreted as a veiled mention of the doubts surrounding the cause of the deaths of 16 people on September 6 in Kostiantinivka, Donetsk province. Ukrainian authorities did not hesitate to suggest that the massacre was caused by a Russian missile, but a New York Times investigation concluded that the tragedy was caused by a malfunctioning Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile. Unlike in the Kostyantinivka case, UN officials in Ukraine are leaning toward Russian responsibility. “Our thoughts are also with the people of Ukraine who have once again witnessed another barbaric consequence of the Russian invasion,” Denise Brown, coordinator of the U.N. office in Ukraine, said in a statement.
This Friday there were still 16 unidentified bodies and four missing people, including two minors. The chairman of the local council of Hroza, a district of neighboring Shevchenkove, was also missing. His son, Dmitro Nechvolod, went to the site of the massacre to recover the few remains of his father’s car, which was parked in the building’s yard. The sirens warning of a possible air attack sounded again as Nechvolod removed the remains of his father’s old utility vehicle. A Russian rocket hit 500 meters away, in Shevchenkove.
Destruction by a Russian missile in the center of Kharkiv on October 6th. Cristian Segura
The day had already begun in Kharkiv province with a new attack on the center of the regional capital. Two rockets, also Iskander rockets, caused the death of two people, a grandmother and her 10-year-old grandson, and left about thirty injured, according to military authorities. Due to Kharkiv’s proximity to Russia – the border is 40 kilometers away – Russian cruise missiles and ballistic missiles can reach their target in a few minutes, which leaves little room for maneuver for air defense. In the municipality of Vovchansk, on the province’s border with Russia, the intruder’s artillery injured six people, according to the province’s governor.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, is a symbol of the country’s resistance to the invaders who unsuccessfully tried to occupy it early in the war. The Ukrainian armed forces liberated almost the entire province in a surprise counteroffensive in September 2022. Cities like Hroza were under Russian control for seven months. Its former inhabitants have returned there in a rocket, leaving it littered with death.
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