Putin's missiles kill ten-year-old in latest blitz a day after 51 died

Posted on 10/06/2023

Putin’s missiles kill ten-year-old boy in latest blitz, a day after 51 died in the Ukraine war’s deadliest strike and Vladimir warned his ‘Satan-2’ nukes are ready for use

The strike targeted residential buildings in Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv
It came just hours after 51 people perished in a strike on the village of Groza
Meanwhile, Putin boasted of Russia’s nuclear might at a conference in Sochi

A 10-year-old boy was killed and 16 people were injured when another Russian missile strike hammered Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv in the early hours of this morning.

Ukraine’s interior minister made the announcement this morning, telling how the child’s lifeless body was pulled out from underneath the ruins of a collapsed residential building.

‘Another targeted attack by Russia on civilians. The body of a 10-year-old child was found under the ruins. Another 16 people were injured,’ Igor Klymenko said in a statement.

The harrowing discovery came just one day after 51 people perished in the single most lethal missile strike on Ukraine since Vladimir Putin sent his troops over the border on February 24, 2022.

That attack targeted a cafe in the village of Groza in the Kharkiv region, where mourners had gathered for a wake in memory of a fallen Ukrainian soldier.

Just 330 people were recorded living in Groza prior to the strike, meaning the Russian rocket attack effectively wiped out around a sixth of the population.

While the devastation unfolded in Ukraine, Putin boasted of Russia’s fearsome nuclear power at a meeting in Sochi, announcing his military scientists had completed work on the Sarmat 2 – or ‘Satan’ – intercontinental ballistic missile while threatening to pull out of the nuclear test ban treaty.

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Police Press Office, smoke raises after a Russian rocket hit a multi-storey building in central Kharkiv, Friday, Oct. 6, 2023

Rescuers work at a site of a residential building damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kharkiv, Ukraine October 6, 2023

A crater is seen at the site of a Russian missile strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kharkiv, Ukraine October 6, 2023

Rescuers search for bodies among the rubble after a Russian attack on a local cafe kills at least 51 including a child in the village of Groza in Kupiansk, Ukraine on October 05, 2023

Ukrainian servicemen load onto the truck the body of a victim who died in a Russian strike that destroyed a shop and a cafe in the village of Groza

Ukrainian policemen carry the body of a victim who died in a Russian strike that destroyed a shop and a cafe in the village of Groza, some 30 kilometres west of Kupiansk, on October 5, 2023

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during his annual meeting with participants of the Valdai Discussion Club on October 5, 2023 in Sochi, Russia

Gut-wrenching pictures of the aftermath of yesterday’s strike on Groza saw blackened and dismembered bodies spread out on the ground opposite the ruins of the cafe.

Putin threatens the West with total nuclear destruction leaving ‘no chance of survival’ in the event of a strike on Russia as he warns his ‘Satan-2’ and ‘Flying Chernobyl’ missiles are ready for use in ranting anti-US speech

Police and soldiers loaded white body bags of unidentifiable bodies onto trucks that would take them to Kharkiv for DNA testing.

‘My son was just found without a head, without arms, without legs, without anything. They recognised him from his documents,’ Volodymyr Mukhovaty, 70, told reporters.

His wife and daughter-in-law were also attending the wake, he said, acknowledging he had ‘little hope’ of finding them alive.

‘I lived with my wife for 48 years,’ he said. ‘I will not last long alone.’

A six-year-old child was also among the victims, said Interior Minister Igor Klymenko, who added that a total of 60 people had been attending the memorial service.

The soldier, whose wake it was, had been killed a month after Russia invaded. He had been buried in the southern city of Dnipro – away from his home village, then under Russian occupation.

He was reburied in Groza on Thursday morning.

His wife and son, also a soldier, were both killed in the strike, a spokesman for the regional prosecutor’s office was quoted as saying by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

Klymenko said initial evidence showed an Iskander missile had been used.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was attending a European summit in Spain, said he had no doubts that the strike had been deliberate.

‘The Russian military could not fail to know where they were hitting,’ he said.

‘It was not a blind strike.’

Large swathes of the Kharkiv region, including Groza, were captured by Russian forces in the early days of their invasion launched in February last year.

Ukrainian forces recaptured much of the border territory during a lightning offensive late last year, but the area has continued to come under regular shelling.

Zelensky’s advisor Mykhailo Podolyak said the Groza attack had ‘no military logic’.

‘This is a reminder to anyone who is willing to smile and shake hands with war criminal (Russian President Vladimir) Putin at international conferences,’ he said.

‘Putin’s Russia is a true evil’.

White House spokeswoman Karin Jean-Pierre meanwhile condemned the ‘horrifying’ strike, saying ‘this is why we’re doing everything that we can to help Ukraine’.

Denise Brown, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, also called the attack ‘absolutely horrifying’, stressing that ‘intentionally directing an attack against civilians or civilian objects is a war crime’.

And British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the strike ‘demonstrated the depths of depravity Russian forces are willing to sink to’, according to a spokesperson.

Rescuers search for bodies among the rubble after a Russian attack on a local cafe kills at least 51 including a child in the village of Groza

Putin’s ominous doomsday warning comes after he said his biggest nuclear missiles – Satan-2 and Burevestnik, aka ‘Flying Chernobyl’ – are now ready for deployment (pictured the Sarmat aka Satan-2 in test launch)

Vladimir Putin threatened the West with total nuclear destruction leaving ‘no chance of survival’ in the event of a strike on Russia

Hours after the attack, Moscow said it had destroyed eight Ukrainian drones in western Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions, but made no mention of any casualties.

Russia continued its attacks overnight elsewhere in Ukraine, targeting port infrastructure in the southern Izmail district, on the Danube river near the Romanian border.

Ukraine’s air force said Friday it had downed 25 Russian attack drones in six regions, including Odesa, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Dnipro, but added that eight more slipped through and hit their targets.

Meanwhile in Sochi, the Russian President delivered a venomous speech at the Valdai Discussion Club, denouncing what he said were threats from the West and vowed there would be ‘no chance of survival’ in the event of a strike on Russia.

In a ranting anti-US speech, the dictator said his powerful ‘Satan-2’ missiles are ready for deployment in an ominous doomsday warning.

Putin told the conference: ‘From the moment the launch of missiles is detected, no matter where it comes from – from any point of the world ocean or from any territory – such a number, so many hundreds of our missiles appear in the air in a retaliatory strike that there is no chance of survival there will be no single enemy left, and in several directions at once.’

The West has not threatened a first strike on Moscow and it is only his officials and an army of propagandists who have talked up the use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict.

Putin asked the West to understand that threats against Russia are ‘absolutely unacceptable for any potential aggressor’.

He said Russia had almost completed work on its nuclear-capable Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile system and successfully tested the nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable Burevestnik strategic cruise missile.

Russia has not conducted a test involving a nuclear explosion since 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Putin declined to rule out the possibility it could resume such testing.

He argued that the leaders of the West had lost ‘a sense of reality’ because of what he cast as Washington’s ‘colonial thinking’, and questioned what right the United States had to lecture any other country and argued that the nation considered itself the only arbiter of truth on the planet.

The Russian leader added that the conflict in Ukraine was ‘not a territorial’ one and that Moscow has ‘no interests from the point of view of conquering some territories’.

He claimed that Ukraine has lost more than 90,000 troops since the start of its counter-offensive in early June and also said that Kyiv has lost 557 tanks and around 1,900 armoured vehicles.

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