Ukraine said at least 51 people were killed in a Russian missile strike on a village shop and a café where a wake was taking place in the eastern Kharkiv region, prompting president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to vow vengeance and appeal for stronger support from the West.
Footage from Hroza, which is about 35km from the front-line town of Kupiansk and some 90km from the Russian border, showed numerous bodies laid out in a garden and beside a village street, and people lifting the dead and wounded from smouldering rubble.
“There were local residents in the store and local residents also in the cafe, where a wake was being held for another deceased villager,” Ukrainian interior minister Ihor Klymenko told national television on Thursday afternoon, before the death toll rose past 50.
“There were about 60 people at the scene of the strike. So far, 49 people have died, including a six-year-old girl. Seven people were seriously injured and are on operating tables. Twenty-nine of the dead have been identified,” he said. “There were 330 people living in this village. From every family, from every yard, one person attended this memorial lunch.”
Officials said it was the deadliest single attack on Kharkiv region since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and it came amid intense fighting near Kupiansk as Russia tries to retake a town that Kyiv’s forces liberated a year ago.
“Russian terror must be stopped. All those who help Russia circumvent sanctions are criminals. Everyone who still supports Russia supports evil. Russia needs this and similar terrorist attacks for only one thing: to make its genocidal aggression the new norm for the entire world,” Mr Zelenskiy said during talks with other leaders in Spain.
“Now we are talking with European leaders, in particular, about strengthening our air defence … about strengthening our troops, about giving our country protection from terror. And we will answer the terrorists. In a way that is absolutely just. And powerful.”
Ukrainian security officials said only civilians were in the shop and café when the missile struck, and that they suspect Russian forces were probably tipped off about the large gathering of people by a local resident. Ukraine frequently arrests people for allegedly passing information to Moscow’s troops to help them target soldiers, buildings or weaponry.
Russian reaction
Moscow claims that its forces only strike military targets and that an invasion that has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians and displaced millions of Ukrainians is actually a defensive operation, to protect Russia from an aggressive West that is using Ukraine to attack it.
“There is permanently increasing military and political pressure [from the West]. We have to respond. I have said many times that it was not us who started the war in Ukraine. On the contrary, we are trying to end it,” Russian president Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.
“We have always tried and are trying to offer solutions that take into account everyone’s interests, but our interlocutors in the West seem to have completely forgotten that there are such concepts as reasonable self-restraint, compromises,” he added, repeating a claim that Russia, with China, is trying to build a fairer geopolitical system.
“All the time, we hear, ‘you must’, ‘you have to’, ‘we’re seriously warning you’. Who are you anyway? What right do you have to warn someone? Maybe it’s time you got rid of your arrogance, stopped behaving that way towards the world,” he said, urging the West “to drop this thinking from the era of colonial rule … That era is long over, and will never return.”
