Days after deadly missile strike on Ukrainian cafe, grief and a search for answers
U.N. and local investigators are searching for answers at the site of a Russian missile strike on a small Ukrainian village
HROZA, Ukraine (AP) — U.N. and local investigators searched for answers on Saturday at the site of a Russian missile strike on a small Ukrainian village that days earlier turned its sole cafe to rubble and killed nearly 52 people gathered for a dead soldier’s wake, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other top officials in Kyiv. Local residents that same day began laying their lost friends to rest.
Representatives from the United Nations Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) spent much of the day speaking with local residents and survivors in Hroza, in the northeastern Kharkiv region, according to a statement shared with the Associated Press.
“My initial conversations with local residents and survivors indicate that virtually all those killed were civilians and that the target itself, a busy village cafe and store, was also clearly civilian,” Danielle Bell, who led the team that visited Hroza on Saturday, was cited as saying in the U.N. statement.
“What happened here is yet another tragic reminder of the deadly impact Russia’s invasion has had on Ukraine’s civilians,” Bell added.
