The pain traitors cause
UKRAINE: ‘I LOST MY WIFE, SON AND HIS WIFE’ AS BROTHERS TELL RUSSIA ALL
Sitting on a bench outside his house, Volodymyr Mukhovaty cursed the informants who are suspected of helping Russia strike his village, killing 59 people, including his wife, son and daughter-in-law.
Authorities in Groza, a village in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, say two of their own – brothers Volodymyr and Dmytro Mamon – gave Moscow coordinates for the devastating missile strike last October.
Targeting a local soldier’s wake, it was one of the deadliest single attacks of the two-year war.
“They were our neighbours... my oldest son went to school with one of them, they were basically inseparable,” Mukhovaty said of the pair.
Looking at the sky with tears in his blue eyes, he raged: “How many people did you send to the grave? What for? You goddamned idiots!”
Six months after the strike, the air around Groza was heavy with grief, distrust and suspicion towards residents deemed pro-Russian.
The divided community shows the challenges facing places liberated after Russian occupation.
Groza was captured by Russia in the first days of the war, before Kyiv’s forces retook control in September 2022.
It is unlikely the accused brothers will face justice in Ukraine. They fled to Russia, where they built a “network of informants”, said Kyiv’s security service.
The few cars that entered Groza drove past a bus stop displaying a banner with Volodymyr Mamon’s portrait.
“The murderers have names – killed 59 fellow villagers for Russian money,” it read.
Just after the bus stop at the village cemetery, there were dozens of freshly-decorated tombs.
All bore the same date of death – 05.10.2023, the day of the strike.
A total of 44 of the 59 killed were residents of Groza village, from a population of around 330, according to local authorities.
They were gathering in a cafe on the main street for the reburial of a local soldier who had died earlier in the war, when a missile tore through the building, reducing it to a pile of rubble and severed body parts.
A Russian official said it was a legitimate military target – a claim rejected by a United Nations report.
A memorial will be built over the cafe’s barel visible foundations. The adjacent children’s playground will remain, its half-destroyed swings swaying silently in the breeze.
Among the dead was eightyear-old Ivan, the grandson of Valentyna Kozyr, who also lost her husband Anatoly, her son Igor, and her daughter Olga.
She is also the aunt of the soldier reburied. “The whole family is dead. There is no one left, only me and my [second] grandson.”
Kozyr was back in town to pick up documents from her house, whose living room has been turned into a shrine.
She said she rarely returned, with the village too heavy with memories.
“I cry, I garden. It was my daughter who used to garden. Now, see, flowers are already coming out.”
Kozyr resented the families she said were pro-Russian, who stayed in Groza.
They would turn against their own again if Moscow’s forces – just 35 km away – recaptured the village, she warned.
One couple in the village who are widely accused of being Russian sympathisers told AFP they supported Ukraine.
But suspicion and distrust run high in the village, sliced apart by grief. –