KHARKIV, Ukraine: A 10-year-old and his grandmother were killed on Friday when Russian missiles smashed into Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, just hours after another attack left dozens dead at a wake in a nearby village.
Rescue workers in Kharkiv were extinguishing fires next to charred vehicles, and twisted missile fragments lay in a deep crater in the center of the city, an AFP journalist at the scene said.
Multiple-story buildings surrounding the debris-strewn blast site were scarred by the impact of two cruise missiles, with dozens of windows blown out. Dazed residents walked beneath the skeletal housing blocks.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack had killed a 10-year-old boy and described the strikes as another example of “Russian terror” in a statement offering condolences to the child’s family.
Kharkiv regional governor Oleg Synegubov said later that municipal workers had retrieved another body.
“Rescue workers found the body of a 68-year-old woman — the grandmother of the killed 10-year-old boy and his injured 11-month-old brother,” he said.
Another 28 people had been wounded, he added.
In an earlier statement, Synegubov described how two Russian missiles had landed in the city. One hit a road in the center of the city; the other slammed into a three-story building, causing a fire that sent plumes of black smoke into the sky.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city that lies in a region bordering Russia, has been under persistent Russian shelling since Moscow’s forces invaded in February last year.
The strikes there came as Synegubov updated the death toll from Thursday’s missile strike on a village in the Kharkiv region that had killed dozens of people less than 24 hours earlier.
“Fifty-two people have died as a result of this missile attack because one more person died in a medical facility,” Synegubov told state-run television, raising the toll by one.
The Kremlin, responding to questions from reporters on the village strike, again insisted that Russian forces do not target civilians in Ukraine.
“Strikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
Those killed in the village of Groza had gathered at a cafe for the wake for a fallen Ukrainian soldier.
The strike provoked outrage from Western leaders while the United Nations said the attack could amount to war crime.
The soldier being commemorated was killed a month after Russia invaded in February last year. He had been buried in the central city of Dnipro — away from his home village, which was then under Russian occupation.
He was reburied in Groza on Thursday morning. His wife and son, also a soldier, were both killed in the strike, officials said.
Around 20 rescuers from Kharkiv city were cleaning the rubble from the destroyed cafe and nearby shop on Friday morning.
Oleksiy and some of his family came to the cemetery to mark out graves for his sister and brother-in-law killed in the attack — their bodies had been taken by police to Kharkiv.
“I don’t know when we will be able to bury them,” he told AFP. “My brother’s body was preserved, but his wife’s head was missing.”
Nearby in the cemetery, a recently dug grave was covered with fresh flowers and a Ukrainian flag. It was the grave of 49-year-old Andriy Kozir, the soldier that villagers had gathered to pay hommage to when a missile hit their cafe.
“Everyone at the wake died,” said 73-year-old Valentyna Koziyenko, who lived opposite the destroyed cafe.
“The strike happened just after people went in,” she told AFP, adding that the blast from the strike had torn the roof off her building.
“How did the Russians know that so many people were in there?” said Koziyenko. “Maybe someone told them.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Friday described the Kharkiv attacks as “atrocities” that “prove that global support for Ukraine must be sustained and increased.”
Swathes of the Kharkiv region were captured by Russian forces in the early days of their invasion, launched in late February 2022.
Ukrainian forces clawed back much of that territory in a lightning offensive late last year.
Deadly new strike as Ukraine mourns dozens killed at wake
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Deadly new strike as Ukraine mourns dozens killed at wake
- Multiple-story buildings surrounding the debris-strewn blast site were scarred by the impact of two cruise missiles
- President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack had killed a 10-year-old boy and described the strikes as another example of “Russian terror”
Russia says foreign forces in Ukraine would be ‘legitimate targets’
- Moscow has repeatedly said it will not tolerate the presence in Ukraine of troops from Western countries
MOSCOW: Russia would regard the deployment of any foreign military forces or infrastructure in Ukraine as foreign intervention and treat those forces as legitimate targets, the Foreign Ministry said on Monday, citing Minister Sergei Lavrov.
The ministry’s comment, one of many it said were in response to questions put to Lavrov, also praised US President Donald Trump’s efforts at working for a resolution of the war and said he understood the fundamental reasons behind the conflict.
“The deployment of military units, facilities, warehouses, and other infrastructure of Western countries in Ukraine is unacceptable to us and will be regarded as foreign intervention posing a direct threat to Russia’s security,” the ministry said on its website.
It said Western countries — which have discussed a possible deployment to Ukraine to help secure any peace deal — had to understand “that all foreign military contingents, including German ones, if deployed in Ukraine, will become legitimate targets for the Russian Armed Forces.”
The United States has spearheaded efforts to hold talks aimed at ending the conflict in Ukraine and a second three-sided meeting with Russian and Ukrainian representatives is to take place this week in the United Arab Emirates.
The issue of ceding internationally recognized Ukrainian territory to Russia remains a major stumbling block. Kyiv rejects Russian calls for it to give up all of its Donbas region, including territory Moscow’s forces have not captured.
Moscow has repeatedly said it will not tolerate the presence in Ukraine of troops from Western countries.
The ministry said Moscow valued the “purposeful efforts” of the Trump administration in working toward a resolution and understanding Russia’s long-running concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion and its overtures to Ukraine.
It described Trump as “one of the few Western politicians who not only immediately refused to advance meaningless and destructive preconditions for starting a substantive dialogue with Moscow on the Ukrainian crisis, but also publicly spoke about its root causes.”
