‘I’ve lost everything’ Hroza residents mourn the 59 civilians killed in Russia’s missile strike on a soldier’s wake, in photos
Emiliano Urbano is a French-Italian photographer and reporter who went to Ukraine in April 2022. For the last year and a half, he’s been traveling throughout the country, including the Donbas region, and documenting the war. Urbano’s past work includes photos from the front lines of the wars in Iraq and Syria for The Washington Post, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit. For Meduza, Urbano attended a funeral in the village of Hroza, where 59 people were killed by a Russian missile strike on October 5.
On October 5, 2023, Russian forces launched a missile strike on a cafe in the village of Horza, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, where residents were gathered for the wake of Andriy Kozyr, a Ukrainian soldier who died earlier in the war. Kozyr was initially buried in the Dnipropetrovsk region, but his son, Denis, decided to rebury him in his home village, which was under Russian occupation at the time of his death.
Denis Kozyr, who organized the wake, is also a soldier in the Ukrainian military. He invited about 60 villagers to the local cafe. According to the latest available data, 59 people were killed in Russia’s strike. (Hroza’s total population before the strike was 330.) Denis Kozyr was killed in the attack, as were his wife, Nina, and her mother.
On October 11, the Ukrainian authorities charged two local residents, 30-year-old Volodymyr Mamon and 23-year-old Dmytro Mamon, with helping the Russian military plan the attack. According to Ukrainian intelligence, the brothers defected to the Russian side during the Russian occupation of Hroza. After the village’s liberation in September 2022, the men fled to Russia, where they conducted “subversive activities,” according to the Ukrainian Security Service. On the eve of the missile strike, the agency alleges, the brothers determined where and when the wake would take place and gave this information to Russian forces.
The day is just beginning, but the gravediggers are already tired. They’ve been digging dark, heavy dirt in the cemetery next to the entrance to the village nonstop for five days to make room for the 59 people — one-sixth of Hroza’s residents — who were killed on October 5.
Almost no family in Hroza was left untouched by the October 5 strike: in a village with just 330 residents, about 60 of them attended the wake of Andriy Kozyr, a Ukrainian soldier who was killed in battle. Yury, a man with a pale face and eyes swollen from tears, wanders through the fresh graves in a stupor. He drops his bicycle and, stumbling over the uneven ground, tries to get to the grave of his wife, who was buried yesterday.
“I don’t know anymore, I don’t know…” he says quietly. “The last time I slept was three days ago. My wife is dead. We were together for 39 years. I’ve lost everything.”
On the village’s main street, there are some ducks and geese with their chicks, as well as a few short-legged dogs. They’re the only beings in Hroza that seem to be alive. The few people I encounter in the village appear stunned. They speak only reluctantly, with a great deal of effort.
“They’re all dead. What else is there to say?” a 50-year-old woman who lost her husband in the strike says with difficulty.
Valeriy and Lyubov Kozyr, who bear no relation to slain soldier Andriy Kozyr, walk back and forth in front of two houses with gabled roofs. The two grew up together, fell in love as children, and later got married. They lost their daughter Olha and their son-in-law Anatoliy in the missile strike.
“They used to joke to each other that they loved each other so much that they would die together one day,” Lyubov says. Her chestnut-brown hair is tied back with a black woolen band. From her face, it’s clear that she’s been crying nonstop for the past five days. She’s holding a picture of her daughter. After glancing at it, Valeriy covers his face with trembling hands and begins to cry.
“Nobody asked the Russians to come liberate us!” Lyubov cries out angrily, repeating a phrase Ukrainians have been saying since Russia first attacked.
Olha and Anatoliy left behind four children. Their oldest son lives abroad, while 17-year-old Dasha, 15-year-old Dima, and 10-year-old Nastya are still in Hroza. Nastya is calm around me, but according to her grandparents, she screams and cries every night.
Lyubov recounts how, on October 5, she heard a strong explosion and felt the ground shake under her feet. Valeriy immediately got on his bike and rode to the cafe, where he saw the bodies of Olha and Anatoly almost immediately. All around him were the smoking ruins of the cafe as well as burning furniture and corpses. He heard the ringing phones of the slain civilians.
Valeriy admits that he prays to God to give him at least five more years of life so that he can take care of his grandchildren. Since Olha’s death, he’s been “dreaming of going to heaven for five minutes to give her one last kiss — and going to hell for five minutes to curse those who committed this crime.”
The bodies of the people killed in the attack were buried as soon as they were returned to Hroza from the Kharkiv morgue. On the day of Olha Panteleiev’s funeral, her father, Valeriy Kozyr, said:
There are all kinds of people in this world. The majority of them are good; only a small fraction of them are truly bad. And somebody needs to punish them. If nobody’s going to do that, then I will.
Photos and text: Emiliano Urbano, reporting from Hroza and Kharkiv in Ukraine
Translation by Sam Breazeale