There were no military targets in the village that was hit by a Russian missile strike Thursday, a top Ukrainian police official said, in what was one of the deadliest attacks against civilians since the conflict began and which the country’s president called “inhuman” and “deliberate.”
Moscow’s forces targeted a cafe and a shop in Hroza, near the eastern Ukrainian city of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region, with what Ukrainian officials say was a powerful Iskander ballistic missile, killing at least 52 people, including a 6-year-old boy.
Scenes emerged of emergency workers wading through dense rubble in the aftermath of the strike – a scale of devastation not seen since a Russian attack on a railway station in Kramatorsk in early 2022 killed more than 60 people.
The death toll in such a small community of 330 people means one in every six residents was killed.
“All the people are local residents, all the people are civilians. Not a single military object, not a single military vehicle. All the dead and wounded people are civilians,” Sergey Bolvinov, the chief investigator with Kharkiv’s regional police, told CNN in Hroza.
Investigators and forensic teams worked through the night sifting through the rubble and trying to count and identify the bodies, many of which were in bad condition due to the force of the blast, according to a CNN team at the scene.
A local man whose wife died in the strike could be seen crouching over her body, too shaken to speak and unable to leave her side. He later helped emergency services lift her body onto a truck to be taken away.
Bolvinov said the bodies of 35 victims have been identified so far.
“I am convinced that in the future this will give us a basis to collect all the evidence and bring the guilty Russian military to justice,” he said, adding that the attack was being investigated as a “violation of the laws and customs of war.”
The number of injured remained at six, Oleh Syniehubov, the head of Kharkiv region’s military administration, said Friday in a post on Telegram.
On Friday, fresh Russian strikes on the city of Kharkiv killed a child, whose body was found under the rubble of a residential building, according to the city’s mayor Ihor Terekhov, who added that the strikes had been “aimed exclusively at the civilian infrastructure.”
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