C T Online Desk: A Russian strike killed at least 51 people gathered for a wake in northeastern Ukraine Thursday, provoking outrage from Western leaders for what the UN warned could be a war crime.
The mourners for a fallen Ukrainian soldier had gathered at a cafe in the village of Groza, in the Kharkiv region.
People who had been in a shop in the same building were also killed in the attack on the small village, which had a population of 330 people.
A spokeswoman for the regional assembly, quoted by Ukrainian media, said it was the single deadliest attack since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.
AFP journalists at the scene of the aftermath saw blackened and dismembered bodies spread out on the ground opposite the ruins of the cafe.
Police and soldiers loaded white body bags of unidentifiable bodies onto trucks that would take them to Kharkiv, where forensic experts would carry out DNA searches.
“My son was just found without a head, without arms, without legs, without anything. They recognised him from his documents,” Volodymyr Mukhovaty, 70, told AFP.
His wife and daughter-in-law were also attending the wake and although he had “little hope” of finding them alive, he watched rescue workers from a distance, just in case.
