At least seven people, including three children and their parents, were killed in the latest of countless Russian attacks on Kharkiv and Kharkiv oblast during the night from 9-10 February. The bodies of all Russia’s victims were so badly charred that formal identification will need to be by DNA.
One of the drones hit an oil depot, with this probably causing the oil leakage which led to Kotelna St and at least 15 private homes going up in flames. The homes included that of 35-year-old Olha Putiatina, a prosecutor for the Vovchansk department of the Chuhuiiv District Prosecutor’s Office. She and her husband had three small sons - Oleksiy, who was seven, four-year-old Mykhailo, and Pavlo, who was only ten months old. All of them were killed when fire engulfed their home, trapping them inside. A couple, aged 66 and 65, were also burned to death in the fire. At least 57 people were injuried in the attack on 10 February, and a huge number of people have been left homeless, without anything.
The intended death toll was certainly much higher, as Russia launched ten such drones from its territory, with eight of these brought down before they could cause the planned carnage and destruction.
Four days earlier, on 6 February, the Russians used C-300 missiles to bomb and destroy a three-storey hotel in Zolochiv (Kharkiv oblast), killing a two-month-old baby boy. His mother, and two other women, were hospitalized. That same day, Russia shelled around 20 villages or other inhabited areas of Kharkiv oblast, with the targets in all cases Ukrainian civilians. On 5 February, they bombed or shelled 18 places in Kharkiv oblast, with Oleh Syniehubov, Head of the Kharkiv Regional Military Administration, reporting that the enemy was escalating the number of such strikes.
Russia attacks Ukrainian cities, villages and other civilian targets on a daily basis, and neither the seven killed on 10 February, nor the baby whose body was pulled from the rubble of a hotel, were ‘newsworthy’ enough to make the international media. The latter preferred to instead broadcast reports, commentary or even excerpts from the ‘interview’ given to Tucker Carlson by Russian leader Vladimir Putin in which he repeated lies about Russia’s war against Ukraine, while refuting the latter’s very existence. That Carlson could be trusted to follow the Kremlin’s script and not ask awkward questions was clear not only to Putin, yet a murderous dictator’s propaganda stunt, unlike the deaths of his country’s victims, was allowed to make the headlines.
