2023-10-05 19:27:29
***Warning, the images in the video above may be shocking.***
At least 51 people, including a child, were killed Thursday by a Russian strike that hit a funeral reception in Groza, a small village in eastern Ukraine, decimated by this tragedy.
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Volodymyr Moukhovaty, a 70-year-old villager, has just seen the body of his son taken out of the rubble and fears that his wife with whom he shared his life for 48 years and their daughter-in-law are also among the dead.
“My son has just been taken out, without a head, without arms, without legs… He was recognized according to his documents, his driving license,” this man, who seems to be in shock, told AFP. .
“My wife and the daughter-in-law… They might have been torn to pieces, who knows. For the moment they have not been found,” continues Volodymyr, black T-shirt and very short gray hair.
He hopes the two women were among the injured taken away by ambulances but admits there is “little hope”. “I won’t survive long on my own. My wife loved me very much,” he says.
Around 7:00 p.m. (5:00 p.m. GMT), after dark, AFP journalists saw soldiers in blue gloves loading white body bags containing the bodies of victims into an army truck one by one.
Around twenty bags were still present just in front of the small, completely destroyed café where the victims had gathered. A little further away, near a gantry with two swings, there were small piles with unidentified body parts.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, currently in Spain for a meeting with European leaders, denounced a “clearly brutal Russian crime” in this locality located in the Kharkiv region, near Kupiansk, a town close to the front line which is regularly the target of Russian bombings.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “strongly condemns” the strike, his spokesperson said. “Attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure are prohibited by international humanitarian law and must stop immediately,” added Stéphane Dujarric.
The bombing, carried out using an Iskander ballistic missile according to preliminary data, completely destroyed a store and a café located in the same building when around sixty people were there, said the Minister of Defense. ‘Inside Igor Klymenko on national television.
Defeat “Evil”
“There were villagers in the store and villagers in the cafe were also gathered” for a reception after a villager’s funeral, Mr. Klymenko said, adding that Groza had 330 inhabitants.
The strike took place around 1:15 p.m. local time on this village about thirty kilometers west of Kupiansk, regional governor Oleg Synegoubov said on Telegram. A six-year-old boy was among the dead, he added.
He denounced the deadliest attack in the Kharkiv region since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022 and declared three days of mourning in this territory.
The Ukrainian Defense Minister urged the West to provide kyiv with more air defense systems.
“Ukraine needs more air defense systems to protect our country from terror,” he argued on X (formerly Twitter).
An advisor to the Ukrainian presidency, Mykhaïlo Podoliak, for his part denounced on hand of war criminal Putin at international conferences.
“(Vladimir) Putin’s Russia is a real Evil” and “we must defeat it. Together,” he concluded.
Russian forces captured large swaths of the Kharkiv region in the first days of the invasion.
The Ukrainian army then liberated almost all of this area in the fall during a lightning offensive in fall 2022, but this area and Kharkiv, a regional center and the country’s second city, come under regular bombardment .
And Russia is currently leading an offensive in the Kupiansk area to try to regain ground and hinder the Ukrainian counter-offensive underway in the east and south to liberate the territories occupied by Moscow.
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