The funeral procession began at midday. Four coffins were taken out of a cottage and loaded into the back of two white vans. The vehicles trundled along a dirt track. Mourners followed, 30 of them, a few clutching carnations. They walked past a grassy football pitch and a pair of chained-up goats before turning right along an avenue of poplars.
Their destination was the village cemetery in Hroza, a community of 300 people in the rustic north-east of Ukraine. Once, the cemetery was small. Over the past few days it had grown as gravediggers chopped down trees and dug fresh plots. They were still working as the cortege arrived, led by a priest, under a flawless blue sky.
The funerals were for four members of the same family: Anatoliy Kozyr, his daughter Olha, son Ihor and grandson Ivan. Ivan was eight. They were killed last week when Russia hit the cafe where they were sitting with an Iskander missile. Fifty-nine people died. Six were wounded. It was one of the worst episodes in Moscow’s bloody war. According to Kyiv’s SBU intelligence agency, it was also a story of treason and betrayal.
For seven months last year, Russian soldiers occupied Hroza. They moved into private houses, looted cars and demanded vodka. Most villagers resented their new foreign overlords. A few welcomed them. They included two brothers, Volodymyr and Dmytro Mamon, who grew up in the village and served as police officers. Both, it is alleged, defected to the Russian side.
When Ukraine seized back Kharkiv province last November, the brothers are said to have left with departing troops and escaped to Russia. According to the SBU, they began building a network of informants inside Ukraine. “Under the guise of friendly conversations and correspondence in chat groups, the traitors asked people for information about the deployment of Ukraine’s armed forces and group events in the region,” the SBU said on Wednesday.
In early October, the brothers allegedly began collecting information about a funeral. They learned that Andriyi Kozyr, a volunteer soldier killed last year in the south of the country, was going to be reburied in Hroza. This had not been possible when the Russians occupied the area. His 24-year-old son, Denys, brought his father’s body home from the city of Dnipro. “Volodymyr Mamon gave this information to the Russians,” the SBU alleges.
The ceremony took place last week. Afterwards, Denys, his 20-year-old wife, Nina, other relatives and friends gathered in the Sputnik cafe for a wake. At 1pm they sat down to lunch. Nine minutes later, the missile obliterated them. The SBU says Mamon knew that the locals who had tipped him off about the event would be inside the cafe. He understood they “would surely die”.
Chat messages released by the agency suggest Mamon held a grudge against one attender. In one, he asks to be reminded of the name of the cafe “back in the homeland”. In another, he writes: “Tell me when he is dead.”
Ukrainian prosecutors have charged Volodymyr, 30, and Dmytro, 23, with high treason. The allegation: the two collaborators in effect murdered their former neighbours and schoolmates.
Locals said the brothers’ mother, Nataliya, had worked in the Sputnik cafe for four years. Many victims were her customers. All were civilians. They had lived together in Samarskaya Street, a pleasant alley of rose-covered houses, vegetable gardens and honking geese.
The Mamons were at number 7. Nobody answered when the Guardian visited. Tatiana Lukashova, who lives two doors away, said the brothers and other family members had fled last year. “They were well off. They had cows and land. They were not poor,” she said. She said she had seen Volodymyr when he worked in the occupiers’ “internal affairs department”. He was manning a Russian checkpoint.
The cafe no longer exists. All that is left is the ruined wall of a shop next door. Standing at the scene of the strike, Andriy Belous said he had come to pay his respects to his brother Vitaliy, one of those killed. He was incensed by remarks made by Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, who said Moscow had wiped out “neo-Nazis” and “Ukrainian nationalists” in Hroza. “My brother was a farmer, a simple guy,” Belous said.
He added: “This is a small community. Everybody knows each other. I couldn’t go to the wake because I was at work. Otherwise I would be dead too.” Why did Russia target civilians? “They are evil. They are killing us. It’s the result of propaganda,” he replied.
As he spoke, Vitaliy’s widow and small daughter laid flowers on the cafe’s bare foundations. The remains of three people who were inside have not been found.
Denys and Nina Kozyr were buried on Tuesday. A day later their relatives – Anatoliy, Olha, Ihor and Ivan – were interred next to them. A military chaplain sang Orthodox prayers, his voice intoning: “Lord have mercy.” Mourners placed traditional offerings on the satin-covered caskets: a candle and loaf of bread. And, in Ivan’s case, two pandas and a hand-knitted pink panther. A framed photo placed on his coffin showed a smiling young boy.
Ivan’s grandmother Valentina Kozyr kissed his picture. Crying, she laid her head on each coffin. “Ivan was kind. He grew up a lot during the war. He used to be a little boy,” she said after the ceremony. She said she had come from western Ukraine, where she had been looking after her other grandchild. “When I saw Ivan’s body in the morgue, I could see he had grown,” she said. Of her daughter Olha, she said: “Everybody loved her.”
About 30 victims will be buried in the cemetery in Hroza. Others have been laid to rest in the nearby town of Shevchenkove. Volodymyr Shudrraviy, a district official, said he was stunned by the death toll and the callous way Russia had ripped the heart out of an innocent village. “The rocket landed directly on the table,” he noted. “There were no military there. It was a funeral for a soldier who died in battle.”
What did he think of Russians? “Motherfuckers,” he said.
