The United Nations Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) has concluded that the missile attack that killed 59 people in a café in the Ukrainian village of Hroza, Kharkiv region, was carried out by the Russian army. This is stated in the report of the UN Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.

According to the report, the UN mission stated that it had “reasonable grounds” to believe that Russia had launched a deadly missile strike on the village of Hroza. Although Russia did not directly admit responsibility for the attack, the Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Security Council described the memorial event in Hroza as a legitimate military target – “an assertion that contradicts the information collected and verified by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine”.

“The new report published today by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine concludes that Russia either failed to take all practicable steps to ensure that the intended object of attack was a military target and not civilians or civilian objects, or deliberately directed the attack at civilians or civilian objects, which in any case constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law,” the statement said.

According to the head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Daniel Belle, the attack on the cafe in Grozny, which killed 36 women, 22 men and an 8-year-old boy, is one of the largest in terms of the number of people killed since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“It (the missile strike – ed.) is a compelling reminder of the human cost of the war in Ukraine and underscores the need to hold those responsible to account,” Belle emphasized.

The report states that extensive damage and weapon remnants found at the site of the incident indicate that the likely cause of the explosion was a Russian Iskander missile.

“This precision-guided, short-range ballistic missile hit the village’s only cafe about 20-25 minutes after 63 local residents had gathered there to honor the memory of a Ukrainian soldier who had been reburied in Grozny and had died in the war earlier,” the report said.

The report indicates that UN human rights monitors documented that all the victims were civilians and that no military personnel or any other legitimate military objective was present at the memorial dinner in or near the café.

Around 13:25 on October 5, the Russian army shot a missile at a café in the Hroza village of Kupiansk district. People have gathered there for a funeral of a fallen soldier. Hroza has 330 residents, but around 100 of them lived there when the tragedy happened. That day, at least 52 people died, six were injured, and another five are now considered missing. An Iskander hit took the lives of almost every second villager. 

GWARA’S CHOICE

Five days of Hroza. The village buries those who died in a Russian attack on October 5. The first dead in a missile strike were buried on October 7. The day before, the digging of 40 graves began at the village cemetery. 

National police forensic experts have identified all the dead in Hroza village. Russian troops killed 59 people with Iskander missile. Forensic experts identified one of the victims, a 60-year-old man, from 20 body parts. Two more people were identified using personal belongings seized from the victims’ homes, as they had no direct line relatives to compare DNA profiles.