The Ukrainian village of Hroza has been plunged into mourning by a Russian rocket strike on a village store and cafe that killed more than 50 people on October 5, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AP

U.N investigators on October 31 urged Russia to acknowledge responsibility for a missile strike on a Ukrainian village that killed 59 civilians, conduct a transparent investigation into what happened, provide reparations for victims and hold those responsible to account.

The strike on a cafe in the village of Hroza on October 5 was one of the deadliest strikes since the Kremlin’s forces launched a full-scale invasion 20 months ago. Whole families perished while attending a wake for a local soldier who died fighting Russian troops. The blast killed 36 women, 22 men and an 8-year-old boy. Numerous bodies were found torn to pieces, and it took nearly a week to identify all the dead.

The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in a report published Tuesday it “has reasonable grounds to believe” that a Russian Iskander missile — a short-range precision-guided ballistic weapon — probably caused the blast in Hroza.

The extensive damage and weapon debris at the scene led investigators to that conclusion, the report said.

It said that Russia “either failed to undertake all feasible measures to verify that the intended target was a military objective rather than civilians or civilian objects, or deliberately targeted civilians or a civilian object.” Either of those explanations amounts to a violation of international humanitarian law, the report said.

The incident “serves as a stark reminder of the human cost of the war in Ukraine and underscores the necessity of holding perpetrators accountable,” Danielle Bell, head of the U.N. mission in Ukraine, said in a statement.

The Kremlin did not directly address the strike in Hroza at the time, but continued to insist that it aims only at legitimate military targets in Ukraine.

Russia’s U.N. ambassador, however, told the U.N. Security Council, that “a high-ranking Ukrainian nationalist” and “a lot of neo-Nazi accomplices” were at the wake.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv officials made any immediate comment on Tuesday’s report.

Repeated civilian deaths have weakened Russia’s claim that it doesn’t target civilians.

Ukraine’s presidential office said early Tuesday that one civilian was killed and at least 17 others were injured over the previous 24 hours.

The death was a woman visiting a cemetery and among the injured were five people traveling on a bus, it said.

Rescues remove debris at a site of buildings of a local cafe and a grocery store, where at least 52 people were killed by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in the village of Hroza, in Kharkiv region, Ukraine October 6, 2023.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

A Russian missile attack killed a 10-year-old boy and his grandmother Friday in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, officials said, a day after a strike in the same region killed at least 51 civilians in one of the deadliest attacks in the war in months.

Associated Press reporters saw emergency crews pulling the boy’s body from the rubble of a building after the early morning attack. He was wearing pajamas with a Spider-Man design.

The strike also killed the boy’s grandmother and injured an 11-month-old child, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Telegram.

He said 28 people were wounded and rescue operations were continuing.

Officials said preliminary information indicated the Kremlin’s forces used two Iskander missiles in the attack, the same as in the previous day’s attack on the eastern village of Hroza that killed 51.

One of the missiles landed in the street, leaving a crater, and the other hit a three-story building, setting it ablaze, according to Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration.

Debris and rubble littered the street. Surrounding buildings were blackened by the blast, which blew out windows and damaged parked cars.

Yevhen Shevchenko, a resident of a nearby nine-story building, said he was in bed when the attack occurred. “There was a blast wave, a powerful explosion. It blew out the windows and doors in the apartment,” he said.

The Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office said the boy was killed as a result of the attack, which injured 23 people.

A day earlier, a Russian Iskander ballistic missile turned a village cafe and store in Hroza, a village in eastern Ukraine, to rubble, killing at least 51 civilians, according to Ukrainian officials.

Around 60 people, including children, were attending a wake at the cafe when the missile hit, the officials said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Friday that Russia was responsible for the Hroza attack. He insisted, as Moscow has in the past, that the Russian military doesn’t target civilian facilities.

The Hroza victims made up most of the 54 civilians killed in the country over the previous 24 hours, Ukraine’s presidential office said Friday.

The office of the U.N. human rights chief, Volker Türk, said he was “shocked and saddened” by the Hroza attack.

It said on X, formerly Twitter, that its human rights monitors intended to visit the site and collect information. “Accountability is key,” it said.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, attending a summit of about 50 European leaders in Spain to rally support from Ukraine’s allies, called the strike a “demonstrably brutal Russian crime” and “a completely deliberate act of terrorism.”

His visit to the summit aimed to secure more military aid, among other goals, and Mr. Zelensky said late Thursday that his efforts had produced results.

“We will have more air defense systems,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. “There will be more long-range weapons.”

The air defense systems are crucial as Ukrainian officials try to prevent attacks like the ones in Kharkiv and amid fears Moscow will resume concerted attacks on power facilities during the winter, in a repeat of its tactics last year when it tried to break Ukrainians’ spirit by denying them electricity.

Mr. Zelensky is also fighting against signs that Western support for his country’s war effort could be fraying.

Concerns over the resupply of Ukraine’s armed forces have deepened amid political turmoil in the United States and warnings that Europe’s ammunition and military hardware stocks are running low.

The Swedish government said Friday it plans to send to Ukraine a military aid package worth 2.2 billion kronor ($199 million), mainly consisting of 155-millimeter artillery ammunition.

“We are preparing for it to be a long war, therefore we need to design our support long-term and sustainably,” Defense Minister Pål Jonson told a press conference. “It is now important that more countries step up to support Ukraine.”