‘The entire village is gone’

The aftermath of Russia’s missile strike on Hroza, where more than 50 people were killed at a dead soldier’s wake

On October 5, Russian troops carried out a missile strike on a shop and an attached cafe in the village of Hroza in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. At the time of the attack, residents were holding a wake for Andriy Kozyr, a Ukrainian soldier who died earlier in the war; Kozyr was initially buried in the Dnipropetrovsk region, but his son decided to rebury him in his home village. Russia’s strike killed at least 52 people, making it one of the deadliest since the start of the full-scale war. Journalists from the Ukrainian outlets Ukrainska Pravda and Babel visited Hroza and spoke to some of the neighbors and relatives of the numerous victims.

The journalists arrived in Hroza two days after the missile strike. According to Babel, the entire village contains three streets and about 100 houses, while the cafe and general store targeted by Moscow’s attack is in the center. Almost nothing is left of the building. Residents organized a spontaneous shrine across from the blast site, placing flowers and memorial lanterns on a playground. The air in the village smells strongly of corpses, Babel reported.

A small cemetery is about 400 meters (1,300 feet) from the village center. To make space for the bodies of everyone killed on October 5, the local authorities plan to expand it by about 50 percent.

Yevhen, a 43-year-old Hroza resident, lost both his parents in the attack. He told journalists that he wanted to attend Kozyr’s burial but wasn’t able to and was at home when the missile hit. His parents, on the other hand, weren’t planning on going to the wake: “But you know how things are in the village. They agreed to go for, say, half an hour. It ended up being their final journey.”

According to Yevhen, he realized as soon as the missile struck that it had hit the store.

I grabbed my uncle and my brother, and said, let’s go. We get there, and everyone there is lying in one corner. There are no walls; everything has collapsed, and only the building’s frame is left. I know what my parents were wearing, and I tell my brother, “Let’s look.” I see a familiar jacket. I walked up, moved a slab, and they’re lying there. Mom and Dad, with his arm placed over her.

Olha, a Hroza resident who lost two daughters-in-law, said that the only reason she didn’t go to the wake herself was that she had to stay behind with her grandsons, both of whom are younger than seven. At the moment of the strike, she was sitting on a bench near her home, not far from the store.

“There wasn’t a whistle, nothing. You know how it usually is? A missile flies over, and you hear it flying, because it roars like a plane. This time, just a boom. I grabbed the kids and took them down to the cellar. And all of the children’s godparents, all of our friends, all of them were there,” she said.

“The entire village is gone, as if none of them ever existed. Entire families were killed. Andriy [Kozyr’s] family is one of them. None of them are left,” said Kozyr’s former neighbor, Alla. At the moment of the attack, she was in a hospital in Kharkiv, but her daughter-in-law attended the wake. When Alla learned what happened, she tried calling her, but nobody answered.

Members of Andriy Kozyr’s family who were killed in the strike include his son Denis and Denis’s wife and mother-in-law; his wife, Alina, and her parents; and his uncle, Anatoliy, and Anatoly’s two children and eight-year-old grandson.

Anatoliy Kozyr’s wife, Valentina, was in Volhynia at the time of the attack. When she learned what had happened, she and her sister returned to the village, where she helped identify the dead.

According to Valentina, she recognized her husband and daughter instantly. “I didn’t recognize our son or our youngest grandson anywhere. Yesterday, I gave a DNA sample. There’s a child in the morgue. We don’t know if he’s ours,” she said.

“Why are the Russians doing this? I don’t know what to say to them. I’ve already said everything there is to say,” she added.

Many Hroza residents, including Valentina’s sister, Olha, said that the strike at the cafe may have been the result of a tip-off from a local. Some villagers reported that officers from the Ukrainian Security Service have come by to check their phones.

Yevhen told journalists he knows of multiple Hroza residents who sympathize with Russia. In particular, he said that a woman named Zoya kept a notebook in which she recorded information about her neighbors, including lists of villagers who received pensions from Ukraine while Hroza was under occupation, and that she provided this information to Russian forces.

“And now what? Zoya will be lying there, two graves over from my parents. She died in the store with everyone else,” he said.