\n<\/p>\n
UNITED NATIONS (AP) \u2014 Russia\u2019s U.N. ambassador claimed Monday that alleged \u201cneo-Nazis\u201d and men of military age were at the wake for a Ukrainian soldier in a village caf\u00e9 that was hit by a missile strike last week, killing 52 people.<\/p>\n
Vassily Nebenzia told a U.N. Security Council meeting called by Ukraine that the soldier was \u201ca high-ranking Ukrainian nationalist,\u201d with \u201ca lot of neo-Nazi accomplices attending.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Thursday\u2019s strike by a Russian Iskander ballistic missile, the village of Hroza in the northeastern Kharkiv region, lost over 15% of its 300 population. The caf\u00e9, which had reopened for the wake, was obliterated, and whole families perished.<\/p>\n
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied last Friday that Russia was responsible for the Hroza attack.<\/a> He insisted, as Moscow has in the past, that the Russian military doesn\u2019t target civilians and civilian facilities.<\/p>\n Nebenzia reiterated that the Russian military doesn\u2019t target civilians and civilian facilities. \u201cWe remind that if the Kyiv regime concentrates soldiers in a given place they become a legitimate target for strikes including from the point of view of IHL,\u201d the initials for international humanitarian law, he told the Security Council.<\/p>\n He also said that putting heavy weapons and missile defenses in residential areas \u201cis a serious violation and leads to the type of tragedy that we\u2019ve talked about today.\u201d<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly painted his enemies in Ukraine as \u201cneo-Nazis,\u201d<\/a> even though the country has a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust and who heads a Western-backed, democratically elected government. The Holocaust, World War II and Nazism have been important tools for Putin in his bid to legitimize Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine<\/a>, but historians see their use as disinformation and a cynical ploy to further the Russian leader\u2019s aims.<\/p>\n The wake in Hroza was for Andriy Kozyr, a soldier from Hroza who died last winter fighting Russia\u2019s invading forces in eastern Ukraine. According to Ukrainian news reports, he was initially laid to rest elsewhere in Ukraine, as his native village remained under Russian occupation.<\/p>\n Kozyr\u2019s family decided to rebury him in Hroza more than 15 months after his death, following DNA tests that confirmed his identity. Among those who died in the missile strike were his son, Dmytro Kozyr, also a soldier, and his wife Nina, who was just days short of her 21st birthday.<\/p>\n Nebenzia claimed that Ukraine\u2019s government wrings its hands about civilians who died in airstrikes on hotels, hostels, cafes and shops, \u201cand then a large number of obituaries of foreign mercenaries and soldiers appear.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat a coincidence,\u201d Nebenzia said. \u201cWe do not exclude that this will be the same with Hroza.\u201d<\/p>\n Albania\u2019s U.N. Ambassador Ferit Hoxha, this month’s council president who presided at the meeting, said the missile strike and deaths in Hroza underscore again \u201cthe terrible price civilians are paying 20 months after the Russians invaded.\u201d<\/p>\n He said Russia may deny responsibility, but it started and is continuing a war and committing \u201chorrible crimes,\u201d and \u201cit has also broken the universal ancestral law of absolute respect for those mourning.\u201d<\/p>\n U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood asked everyone in the council chamber to take a moment and let the appalling fact sink in: \u201cPeople gathered to grieve their loved ones must now be grieved themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is one of the deadliest strikes by Russia against Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion last year,\u201d he said, stressing U.S. support for investigators from the U.N. and local authorities who have gone to Hroza to gather possible evidence of war crimes.<\/p>\n China\u2019s deputy U.N. ambassador Geng Shuang, whose country is a close ally of Russia, said Beijing finds the heavy civilian casualties in the attack on the village \u201cconcerning.”<\/p>\n \u2014-<\/p>\n Associated Press Writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report from the United Nations<\/p>\n<\/div>\n