By Max Hunder
KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service on Wednesday accused two villagers who fled to Russia of helping guide a missile strike that killed dozens of people, mostly civilians, at a soldiers’ wake in the Ukrainian village of Hroza.
The Oct. 5 strike was the deadliest attack in Ukraine this year, and one of the worst since Russia invaded in February 2022. Ukrainian prosecutors put the death toll at 55, and a local official told Reuters a sixth of the northeastern village’s population of about 300 people had been killed.
Moscow denies targeting civilians in its full-scale invasion, a position it repeated in response to a question at a Kremlin briefing about the strike on Hroza.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the briefing that Russia strikes Ukraine’s military infrastructure, as well as concentrations of troops and the Ukrainian military leadership.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that the two suspects, who were brothers, worked for Russian occupation authorities when Moscow controlled the village for several months in 2022.
The SBU said the men fled to Russia shortly before Ukraine regained control of the village in September last year. After this, the agency said the men continued to work for Russia by building a network of informants in Ukraine.
When Reuters visited the village last Friday, two residents said that SBU officials had visited the village and checked residents’ phones after the attack.
According to the SBU, the brothers started gathering information on the wake in Hroza at the beginning of October.
“Under the guise of friendly conversations and correspondence in the messenger (service), the traitors asked people for information about the deployment of the Defence Forces and mass events in the region,” the SBU said.
The agency posted images which appeared to show Russian passports and other documents belonging to the men, as well as screenshots of messenger conversations where the men obtained information about the wake.
Reuters could not independently verity the information.
(Reporting by Max Hunder; Editing by Timothy Heritage and Mark Heinrich)
