Western media were swift to report Russian claims on 1 January 2026 that Ukraine had conducted a drone strike against a café in occupied Khorly (a resort village by the sea in occupied Kherson oblast), with this supposedly killing 24 ‘civilians’. That the truth was very different was confirmed even by Sania Denisova, an unwavering supporter of Russia’s war against Ukraine and of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
There was, undoubtedly, a drone attack on occupied Khorly with the first strike during Putin’s address just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. The attack virtually destroyed the ‘Ukrainian Khata Café’ and caused considerable damage to the adjoining Leo Hotel. This was, predictably, called ‘an act of terrorism’ by the aggressor state which bombs Ukrainian apartments and other civilian targets on a nearly daily basis. Volodymyr Saldo, the Russian-installed ‘governor’ of occupied Kherson oblast, suggested on Russian state-controlled TV that the attack had either been about “intimidation” or about “disrupting [peace] negotiations’. The main falsehood, however, lay in another assertion made by Saldo, namely that the café was full “of people with no link to the military profession”.
The assumption was, presumably that western media would report swiftly and then lose interest, since even the Russian invaders almost immediately gave the lie to such claims. One of those killed was, for example, 55-year-old Serhiy Bohan, the Russian-installed ‘head of police’ in occupied Kalanchak. Even without his track record of having first betrayed Ukraine in 2014 and his involvement in abductions and torture of civilians in the Skadovsk district of Kherson oblast, Bohan’s post as occupation police head made him an evidently legitimate target. According to Ukraine’s Centre for Journalist Investigations [CJI], Russian social media pages also report that Russian soldiers were among the dead, as well as people who had no link with Kherson oblast.
There were no “local residents”, as claimed. Nor, most importantly, could there have been. Ukrainian sources, including CJI, had long reported that the Russian invaders had turned Khorly into a military base and had essentially driven out most of the local residents. This was an essentially ‘closed’ resort, with Russian checkpoints all around allowing only those who had passes to enter.
It is likely that Oksana Buhanova, the owner of the hotel and café was killed in the attack. Oleh Baturin, writing for CJI, reports that Buhanova chose to collaborate with the invading army and reopened the hotel and cafe in the summer of 2022 for very different clientele. She had to find new staff, however, as the cooks refused to work there when they discovered that they would be serving only the Russian military. There were some who received ‘special passes’, Baturin writes, including Natalia Ostrovska, who opened a brothel, with a sauna for the invaders. Her daughter, Hanna Ostrovska, is on the list of people killed in the attack.
The most damning evidence, however, comes from a source that the Russians cannot simply dismiss as ‘biased’ or ‘pro-Ukrainian’. Sania Denisova is a ‘Russian volunteer’ known for her support of Russia’s full-sale scale invasion of Ukraine and of Putin’s regime.
She first gave a detailed, and scathing, description of the situation in Khorly in three posts on 19 August 2025, and then reminded readers of that assessment in a post on 1 January 2026.
In the first August 2025 post, Denisova wrote about how local residents were being driven from their homes. The occupation administration, she explained, “adds all homes that take their fancy to the list of ownerless homes, even where the owners write and prove that the homes have not been abandoned.”
She notes that only the most sumptuous homes get put on this ‘ownerless’ register, with shacks “for some reason” not ending up there. Bribes or similar incentives are then used so that the Russian-installed head of Khorly, Serhiy Zapuskalov then hands over these homes to those “needed” and high-ranking individuals.
Denisova ends this first post with the largely rhetorical question:
“If the owner writes, confirms his/her rights, why are they ignored? Or is ‘ownerless’ now a magic word used to take people’s property from them?
Although we know from the example of Mariupol that they can take people’s homes away whose owner is in the city and did not leave.”
In the second post, she reports that at a meeting, Zapuskalov and his crony openly stated “We will evict you all and settle the “right people” in Khorly”.
Despite clearly seeing and describing what Russian occupation, which she may even believe was ‘Russian liberation’ has brought to the residents of both Khorly and Mariupol, Denisova still suggests, in the third post, that her readers should circulate the posts so that “those in high places hear” what is going on,
On 1 January 2026, Denisova wrote that “the tragedy in Khorly, Kherson oblast, was predictable. I wrote about this in detail earlier – about the system of illegal seizures [рейдерство], intimidation and total lawlessness which both the former and the current ‘bosses’ of the village have established. Therefore, reading now about the tragedy, I don’t believe that local residents were celebrating anything during those days….”
Local residents had been driven out, “fear rules, and lawlessness”, she says, adding that there had been no reaction to her earlier warnings and no control from the enforcement bodies. This is, in fact, scarcely surprising. Russia’s FSB and Rosgvardia, in particular, have no incentive to ‘react’ when, on all occupied territory, they, and their families, have benefited from such lawlessness. This, however, Denisova is presumably unable or unwilling to recognize.
Her reports do, however, lay bare the cynical lies about a supposed attack on ‘local residents, innocently celebrating New Year’.
