\n Russian missiles smashed into residential buildings in east Ukraine's Kharkiv on Friday, killing a 10-year-old boy, just hours after a strike killed more than 50 people attending a wake in a nearby village.\n<\/p>\n
\n Rescue workers in Kharkiv were extinguishing fires next to charred vehicles, and missile fragments lay at the bottom of a deep crater in the centre of the city, an AFP journalist at the scene said.\n<\/p>\n
\n Multiple-storey buildings surrounding the debris-strewn blast site were scarred by the strikes, with dozens of windows blown out and dazed residents walking beneath skeletons of housing blocks.\n<\/p>\n
\n President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack had left a 10-year-old boy dead and described the strikes as another example of \"Russian terror,\" in a statement offering condolences to the killed boy's family.\n<\/p>\n
\n The regional governor Oleg Synegubov said 27 people, including an 11-month-old child, had been injured and that search operations were ongoing.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"One of the missiles hit a road; windows were broken in neighbouring houses,\" he said. \"The second missile hit a three-storey residential building, causing a fire.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city that lies in a region bordering Russia, has been under routine shelling since Moscow's forces invaded in February last year.\n<\/p>\n
\n - Attack on soldier's wake -\n<\/p>\n
\n The fallout from the missile strikes on the city near the border with Russia came as Synegubov updated the toll of attacks on a village in the Kharkiv region less than 24 hours earlier that left more than 50 dead.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Fifty-two people have died as a result of this missile attack because one more person died in a medical facility,\" Synegubov told state-run television, raising the toll by one.\n<\/p>\n
\n Those killed in the village of Groza -- also in the Kharkiv region -- had gathered at a cafe for the wake for a fallen Ukrainian soldier.\n<\/p>\n
\n The strike provoked outrage from Western leaders while the United Nations said the attack could amount to war crime.\n<\/p>\n
\n The soldier who was being commemorated was killed a month after Russia invaded in February last year. He had been buried in the central city of Dnipro -- away from his home village, then under Russian occupation.\n<\/p>\n
\n He was reburied in Groza on Thursday morning. His wife and son, also a soldier, were both killed in the strike, officials said.\n<\/p>\n
\n Around 20 rescuers from Kharkiv city were cleaning the rubble from the destroyed cafe and nearby shop on Friday morning.\n<\/p>\n
\n - 'Everyone died' -\n<\/p>\n
\n Oleksiy and some of his family came to the cemetery to mark out graves for his sister and brother-in-law, killed in the attack -- their bodies had been taken by police to Kharkiv.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"I don't know when we will be able to bury them. My brother's body was preserved, but his wife's head was missing,\" he told AFP.\n<\/p>\n
\n Nearby 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<\/p>\n
\n \"Everyone at the wake died,\" said 73-year-old Valentyna Koziyenko who lived opposite the destroyed cafe.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"The strike happened just after people went in,\" she told AFP, adding that the blast from the strike had torn the roof off her building.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"How did the Russians know that so many people were in there?\" Koziyenko said. \"Maybe someone told them.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Friday described the attacks in Kharkiv as \"atrocities\" that \"prove that global support for Ukraine must be sustained and increased.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n Swathes of the Kharkiv region were captured by Russian forces in the early days of their invasion but Ukrainian forces have clawed back much of the territory since a lightning offensive late last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Russian missiles smashed into residential buildings in east Ukraine's Kharkiv on Friday, killing a 10-year-old boy, just hours after a strike killed more than 50 people attending a wake in a nearby village. Rescue workers in Kharkiv were extinguishing fires next to charred vehicles, and missile fragments lay at the bottom of a deep crater […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-122821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n