- A Russian missile hit a small village in northeast Ukraine on Thursday, killing at least 51 people.
- Ukrainian officials said there were "no military targets" in the deliberate attack on Hroza.
Dozens of people are dead after a Russian missile struck a grocery store and cafe in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region, officials said on Thursday. The attack appears to be one of the deadliest on civilians this year.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported the attack shortly before 4 p.m. local time in a Telegram message, and said 48 people were confirmed killed in the small village of Hroza. Ukraine's foreign affairs ministry said shortly after Zelenskyy's note that the death toll had risen to 49, with another six people left injured.
The president followed up his earlier post with another announcing that at least 51 people are reported dead.
Rustem Umerov, Kyiv's defense minister, cited the culprit as an unspecified type of Russian missile. "Ukraine needs more air defense systems to protect our country from terror. We are discussing this with partners," he said.
Ukraine's defense ministry said in a statement that the attack was "deliberately" carried out around lunch time to ensure maximum casualties. "There were no military targets there. This is a heinous crime intended to scare Ukrainians," it wrote on social media.
Photographs and videos from the scene showed widespread destruction and devastation, as well as bloodied and dusty bodies, while search-and-rescue crews scoured the rubble.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential advisor, said the attack is "a reminder to anyone who is willing to smile and shake hands with war criminal" Russian President Vladimir Putin at international conferences.
"A reminder to all those who are willing to post memes and mock Ukrainians," he wrote in a post on X, the social media platform formally known as Twitter. "A reminder to all those who want to sell something to Russia and return to bloody business as usual. Putin's Russia is a true evil, and this is not just a metaphor or a figure of speech."
Hroza is located east of Kharkiv near the city of Kupiansk, which is just west of the current front lines and Russian-held territory. That area was liberated during Ukraine's blitz-style counteroffensive in the northeastern region last fall, when Kyiv's forces quickly reclaimed huge chunks of territory in a surprise offensive.
The strike on Thursday appears to be one of the deadliest Russian attacks, if not the deadliest, on Ukrainian citizens this year. In January, Moscow's forces fired an anti-ship missile into a residential area in the central city of Dnipro, killing 45 people and injuring nearly 80 others. The latest strike is also among the more devastating of Russia's 19-month-long war.
There have been almost 27,500 civilian casualties since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to the latest United Nations data from September 24. This figure includes more than 9,700 people killed and over 17,700 injured. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, however, "believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration."
The attack comes as Ukrainian forces continue to press on with their months-long counteroffensive, which has led to small territorial gains in the eastern and southern regions.