HROZA, Ukraine: A Russian missile slammed into a cafe and grocery store in a village in northeastern Ukraine on Thursday, killing 51 people during a gathering to mourn a fallen Ukrainian soldier, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the incident was a deliberate attack on civilians and “no blind strike.”
Large piles of bricks, shattered metal and building materials remained where the cafe and shop were hit early in the afternoon in Hroza village in Kharkiv region.
The attack was the deadliest in Kharkiv region since Russia’s invasion more than 19 months ago, a regional official told public broadcaster Suspilne. It also appeared to be one of the biggest civilian death tolls in any single Russian strike.
Regional police told national television the death toll stood at 51, with six injured and three missing. Some of them were mourners gathering in the cafe after a service for a fallen soldier from the village.
“A deliberate missile strike on a village in Kharkiv region on an ordinary store and cafe,” Zelensky said in his nightly video address, delivered while attending a summit of the European Political Community in Spain.
“Russian troops could not have been unaware of where they were hitting. This was no blind strike.”
Moscow did not immediately comment on the events in Hroza. Moscow denies deliberately targeting civilians, but many have been killed in attacks that have hit residential areas as well as energy, defense, port, grain and other facilities.
The village was near the town of Kupiansk, recaptured by Ukrainian forces late last year and close to one of the war’s front lines.
Zelensky said a six-year-old boy was among the dead and regional officials said families had remained in the village despite a war-time order to evacuate.
Rescue workers made their way through mounds of debris and laid out bodies in a field next to a children’s playground.
Some were placed in white body bags and taken away. Others were barely covered by carpets or other materials, with hands awkwardly protruding.
“It’s difficult to talk about this, but we only found bits and pieces and remains of the bodies,” said regional police investigator Serhiy Bolvinov. “We’ll use DNA laboratories to identify the bodies.”
The missile hit during a service marking the reburial in his home village of a soldier who had died in action elsewhere.
“There were only civilians. The boy was from this village. When he died, we were under occupation. The (family) decided to rebury him, to bring him home,” said resident Oleksandr Mukhovatyi.
“Then this happened. Someone betrayed us. The attack was precise, it all landed in the coffee shop.”
Mukhovatyi said his mother, brother, and sister-in-law were among the dead.
Prosecutors told public broadcaster Suspilne that the son of the soldier undergoing reburial — also a soldier — was also killed in the attack, along with the son’s wife and mother.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said local officials had been sitting down for a meal when the missile struck.
“From every family, from every household, there were people present at this commemoration. This is a terrible tragedy,” Klymenko told Ukrainian television.
Klymenko cited preliminary information that he said showed the attack was carried out with an Iskander ballistic missile.
He said the strike was clearly targeted and that Ukrainian security services had launched an investigation into the matter.
“The terrorists deliberately carried out the attack during lunchtime, to ensure a maximum number of casualties,” said Defense Minister Rustem Umerov.
“There were no military targets there. This is a heinous crime intended to scare Ukrainians.”
Russia has frequently carried out air strikes since the start of its invasion. Ukraine has launched a counteroffensive in the south and east that it says is gradually making progress.
Russian missile strike on Ukraine village kills 51 during memorial to fallen soldier
https://arab.news/b2uaa
Russian missile strike on Ukraine village kills 51 during memorial to fallen soldier
- A cafe and a shop were struck early in the afternoon in the village of Hroza in the Kharkiv region
- Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said that residents of the small village of about 330 people had been holding a memorial service in the cafe that was hit
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
