Young couple killed in Russian missile strike on Hroza: details of tragedy
A young couple, Denys and Nina Kozyr, have been killed in a Russian missile attack on the village of Hroza in Kharkiv Oblast.
At present, there are reports that the cafe was a place to pay tribute to the fallen hero Andrii Kozyr. Andrii was killed in 2022 and buried in Dnipro. His son Denys organised the memorial service. The son and his father had come back from Poland to Lviv at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Following Denys’ father’s visit to a military draft office, he was deployed to Popasna, where the man sustained a fatal injury.
Denys served until June. Afterwards, he moved to Hroza and got married to 20-year-old Nina, who worked as a laboratory assistant at the Kharkiv Humanitarian and Pedagogical Academy. The woman had also been killed in the attack.
"I am grateful to fate that for almost 4 years, I have studied, sat behind the same desk, and participated in the same choir part with you. I opened up the world of volunteering for her; she made me fall in love with her folk singing, especially with the song Poliubyla Petrusia (I Fell in Love with Petrus). We used to do things together; we might have cried sometimes, but we definitely laughed a lot.
I could write about this bright and kind person for ages... But I want to say one thing: Nina was a blood donor, so she will go on living not only in our hearts but also in others," says her friend Kateryna Litvin.
Nina has a younger sister, Alina. Kateryna asks people to help her in any way possible.
Besides Denys and Nina, the wife's grandparents and mother were killed.
The tragedy also affected another local resident of Hroza, Oleksandr Mukhovatyi. In a comment to Ukraine's public broadcaster Suspilne, Oleksandr said he had also lost three family members at once: his brother, sister-in-law and mother. The man was at home during the tragedy.
When Oleksandr saw the cloud of smoke after the explosion, he tried to call his family. But nobody picked up the phone, except for his nephew, who told him everyone was under the rubble.
"I rushed there straight away. My brother was found, but my mother and sister-in-law were not yet. They were definitely there. I took my brother's passport out of his trousers. I still don't understand what happened and how things are going to be. I can't believe it; it just doesn't sink in," the man says.
Oleksandr also added that only the lower part of his brother's torso survived.
Background: On 5 October, the Russian forces launched a missile attack on the village of Hroza in Kharkiv Oblast, which claimed the lives of 52 people. An 8-year-old child was among them. Emergency workers carry out search and rescue operations in the village and work with volunteers to deal with the aftermath. Other body parts were found on 6 October.
Reports indicate that the missile hit a local store. Local residents were paying their last respects to a fallen soldier in a cafe nearby. The village of Groza was home to 330 residents as of the time of the incident, according to Ukraine's Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko. At least one member of every family in the village attended the memorial dinner. The minister added that there is concern that the attack was directed by one of the local residents.
Earlier, Dmytro Chubenko, spokesman for the Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor's Office, said the Russians might have thought that the military would be present at the wake. However, it has been confirmed that only civilians were in the cafe.
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