Multiple-story buildings surrounding the debris-strewn blast site were scarred by the impact of two cruise missiles
\nKHARKIV
\nA 10-year-old and his grandmother were killed on Friday when Russian missiles smashed into Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, just hours after another attack left dozens dead at a wake in a nearby village.
\nRescue workers in Kharkiv were extinguishing fires next to charred vehicles, and twisted missile fragments lay in a deep crater in the center of the city, an AFP journalist at the scene said.
\nMultiple-story buildings surrounding the debris-strewn blast site were scarred by the impact of two cruise missiles, with dozens of windows blown out. Dazed residents walked beneath the skeletal housing blocks.
\nPresident Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack had killed a 10-year-old boy and described the strikes as another example of \u201cRussian terror\u201d in a statement offering condolences to the child\u2019s family.
\nKharkiv regional governor Oleg Synegubov said later that municipal workers had retrieved another body.
\n\u201cRescue workers found the body of a 68-year-old woman \u2014 the grandmother of the killed 10-year-old boy and his injured 11-month-old brother,\u201d he said.
\nAnother 28 people had been wounded, he added.
\nIn an earlier statement, Synegubov described how two Russian missiles had landed in the city. One hit a road in the center of the city; the other slammed into a three-story building, causing a fire that sent plumes of black smoke into the sky.
\nKharkiv, Ukraine\u2019s second-largest city that lies in a region bordering Russia, has been under persistent Russian shelling since Moscow\u2019s forces invaded in February last year.
\nThe strikes there came as Synegubov updated the death toll from Thursday\u2019s missile strike on a village in the Kharkiv region that had killed dozens of people less than 24 hours earlier.
\n\u201cFifty-two people have died as a result of this missile attack because one more person died in a medical facility,\u201d Synegubov told state-run television, raising the toll by one.
\nThe Kremlin, responding to questions from reporters on the village strike, again insisted that Russian forces do not target civilians in Ukraine.
\n\u201cStrikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated,\u201d Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
\nThose killed in the village of Groza had gathered at a cafe for the wake for a fallen Ukrainian soldier.
\nThe strike provoked outrage from Western leaders while the United Nations said the attack could amount to war crime.
\nThe soldier being commemorated was killed a month after Russia invaded in February last year. He had been buried in the central city of Dnipro \u2014 away from his home village, which was then under Russian occupation.
\nHe was reburied in Groza on Thursday morning. His wife and son, also a soldier, were both killed in the strike, officials said.
\nAround 20 rescuers from Kharkiv city were cleaning the rubble from the destroyed cafe and nearby shop on Friday morning.
\nOleksiy and some of his family came to the cemetery to mark out graves for his sister and brother-in-law killed in the attack \u2014 their bodies had been taken by police to Kharkiv.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t know when we will be able to bury them,\u201d he told AFP. \u201cMy brother\u2019s body was preserved, but his wife\u2019s head was missing.\u201d
\nNearby in the cemetery, a recently dug grave was covered with fresh flowers and a Ukrainian flag. It was the grave of 49-year-old Andriy Kozir, the soldier that villagers had gathered to pay hommage to when a missile hit their cafe.
\n\u201cEveryone at the wake died,\u201d said 73-year-old Valentyna Koziyenko, who lived opposite the destroyed cafe.
\n\u201cThe strike happened just after people went in,\u201d she told AFP, adding that the blast from the strike had torn the roof off her building.
\n\u201cHow did the Russians know that so many people were in there?\u201d said Koziyenko. \u201cMaybe someone told them.\u201d
\nUkrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Friday described the Kharkiv attacks as \u201catrocities\u201d that \u201cprove that global support for Ukraine must be sustained and increased.\u201d
\nSwathes of the Kharkiv region were captured by Russian forces in the early days of their invasion, launched in late February 2022.
\nUkrainian forces clawed back much of that territory in a lightning offensive late last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Multiple-story buildings surrounding the debris-strewn blast site were scarred by the impact of two cruise missiles KHARKIV A 10-year-old and his grandmother were killed on Friday when Russian missiles smashed into Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, just hours after another attack left dozens dead at a wake in a nearby village. Rescue workers in Kharkiv were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360187,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-360175","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n