Grief follows deadly attack in Ukraine
HROZA, Ukraine — U.N. and local investigators searched for answers Saturday at the site of a Russian missile strike on a small Ukrainian village days earlier that turned its sole cafe to rubble and killed nearly 52 people gathered for a dead soldier’s wake, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other top officials in Kyiv. Also Saturday, local residents began laying their lost friends to rest.
Representatives from the U.N. Monitoring Mission in Ukraine spent much of the day speaking with residents and survivors in Hroza, in the northeastern Kharkiv region, according to a statement shared with the Associated Press.
“My initial conversations with local residents and survivors indicate that virtually all those killed were civilians and that the target itself, a busy village cafe and store, was also clearly civilian,” Danielle Bell, who led the team that visited Hroza on Saturday, was cited as saying in the U.N. statement.
“What happened here is yet another tragic reminder of the deadly impact Russia’s invasion has had on Ukraine’s civilians,” Bell added.
The cafe was obliterated and whole families died after the missile strike Thursday cut short a wake for Andriy Kozyr, a soldier from Hroza who died last winter fighting Russia’s invading forces in eastern Ukraine.
According to Ukrainian news reports, he initially was laid to rest elsewhere in Ukraine, as his native village remained under Russian occupation. Kozyr’s family decided to rebury him in Hroza more than 15 months after his death, following DNA tests that confirmed his identity, and the cafe reopened especially to let residents honor his memory.
His son Dmytro Kozyr, also a soldier, was among those who died in the attack alongside his wife, Nina, who was just days short of her 21st birthday.
As of Saturday, Ukrainian law enforcement and the regional prosecutor’s office put the number of victims at 52.
Only six people in the cafe survived, and the town is trying to fathom why and how the wake was targeted. Dmytro Chubenko, spokesman for the regional prosecutor, said Friday that investigators are looking into whether someone from the area transmitted the cafe’s coordinates to the Russians — a betrayal to everyone now grieving in Hroza.
Among them are Kateryna Tarannyk and her brother Dmytro Androsovych, whose parents were killed at Kozyr’s wake and buried Saturday at a small cemetery on the village’s outskirts. Relatives of Tetiana Androsovych, 60, and Mykola Androsovych, 63, gathered alongside Hroza residents under a grim gray sky, as rain kept falling into the fresh open graves nearby that had been dug for other victims.
Tarannyk and her brother stood embracing each other, gazing at their parents’ closed caskets, throughout the Orthodox service.
“It feels like you’re in a bad, incomprehensible dream, waiting to wake up. It’s just unbearable,” Tarannyk said.
Mykola Androsovych and his wife were buried several rows from Kozyr, the soldier whose wake they had attended. The tiny cemetery has grown substantially in the last two days, as fresh graves keep appearing.
Ukrainian police have identified 48 of the 52 civilians killed by the missile blast, according to the chief police investigator for Kharkiv province. In a Facebook post, Serhii Bolvinov said investigation teams were “gathering up dead bodies, literally piece by piece.”
Hroza, which had a population of about 500 before the war, was seized by Russia early in the war before being recaptured by Ukraine in September 2022 along with neighboring areas.