On October 5, 2023, the Russian military fired an Iskander missile on a cafe in the village of Groza in Kharkiv region. A memorial dinner was held at the institution, which was attended by many residents of the village. The attack killed 59 people, including an eight-year-old child.
Photographer Yakov Lyashenko captured the aftermath of the rocket attack on the village of Groza, the burial of the dead and the grief of those who remained.
New cemetery
On October 5, 2023, at 13:24 the Russian army shelled the village of Groza, Kharkiv region, which is located 35 km from the front line. The Iskander missile hit a cafe where a memorial dinner was being held at the time. Residents of the Thunderstorm said goodbye to their fellow villager Andrei Kozyr. The man mobilized as a volunteer in March 2022 and died in fighting near Popasna in less than a month. At the beginning of the full-scale war, Groza was occupied by the Russian military and Andrei was buried in the Dnipropetrovsk region. After the release of the Thunderstorm, his son Denis, who had mobilized with his father, decided to rebury him in his native village. Denis Kozyr served until June 2022.
Then he moved to Grozo and married Nina, who worked as a laboratory assistant at the Kharkiv Humanitarian and Pedagogical Academy. Together with his wife, they decided to organize reburial and remembrance. Almost a third of the villagers came to the cafe — 60 people. 59 people were killed, including an eight-year-old boy. A new cemetery has grown in the village, in the center of which is the grave of Andriy Kozyr. Further on the outskirts lies a large family: wife, daughter, son, daughter-in-law, uncle, cousins and nephews. The date of death for all of them is October 5, 2023.
A week later, SBU investigators named the probable names of Russian missile launchers. They turned out to be two former locals of Grozy — Vladimir Mamon and his younger brother Dmitry. On the eve of the liberation of Kharkiv region, the brothers fled to the Russian Federation and asked their fellow villagers and relatives about the location of the Ukrainian Defense Forces and about mass events in the Kharkiv region. It is noteworthy that before the release of the Thunderstorm, the Mammon brothers were friends with the Kozyrov family. The prosecutor's office launched a pre-trial investigation into the terrorist attack, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights sent a field team to the village to gather information. In the end, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights confirmed that the missile strike on the village of Groza in the Kharkiv region on October 5 was caused by the Russian army, and all 59 dead were civilians.
A third of the village
The consequences of the missile attack on the village of Groza were filmed by Ukrainian photographer Yakov Lyashenko, who arrived there immediately after the missile hit. “Then I was a photographer for EPA Images. The editor called me and asked if I was free now and if I had a camera. He said that there is an arrival, where there are many victims, and we need to leave urgently,” recalls Yakov Lyashenko. “I did not even know the exact address and was driving in the direction of Kupyansk. Then the editor told me the location. At the same time, I watched the news and learned about the tragedy in the Thunderstorm.” Yakiv adds that he was one of the first to get to Grozo, because a lot of Ukrainian and foreign journalists came there later.
“When I arrived, I was shocked by what I saw. Everything was littered with the bodies of the dead — they were lying on both sides of the fence. Most likely, most of the people had already managed to be pulled out from under the rubble and transferred from the cafe, - says Lyashenko. “When I approached the village, I did not see corpses, but I already felt this specific smell. I don't even know how to properly describe the smell of dead people — the smell of blood, burnt flesh... But when you feel that smell, you immediately realize that someone has died.” In the Thunderstorm, such a specific smell was quite palpable.
Immediately after arriving in the village of Groza, police officers, and forensic experts arrived to collect bodies or their parts, as well as record people's testimonies. “There were fragments of bodies lying around: somewhere an arm, somewhere a leg, and somewhere just a piece of incomprehensible meat. Everything lay separately. There were completely dead bodies, but people were dead,” says the photographer. He recalls that a young woman walked by a rocket and helped the police in identifying the bodies. “The village is small and everyone knows each other. The woman walked and called the names and surnames of the dead. Some bodies were difficult to recognize — some burned, others were crushed with a stove,” says Yakov Lyashenko.
The photographer was in the village until dark and went home to give pictures of the storm to the photo agency. Lyashenko went there several more times and filmed preparations for the burials and funeral services of the dead villagers, communicated with local residents. “If this was my first shooting of the dead, maybe it would be harder for me morally. However, this is not the first time I have filmed the consequences of the arrivals. I'm used to shooting like this. Although I would not like to get used to this at all,” says Yakov Lyashenko.
Windows without light
Yakov Lyashenko says that all the stories of the inhabitants of the Thunderstorm are special. Recalls a woman who did not go to the memorial because her brother died that morning and she was busy preparing for the funeral. It saved her life. Jacob says that the woman was very depressed and did not want to go anywhere. However, she admitted that if she had been persuaded a little longer, she would have agreed. Another woman who came to the cemetery could not change with anyone at work and stayed to work. This saved her from death or serious injury. Opposite the cafe lives a family whose house was badly damaged by the blast wave: the roof was cut off, the windows were blown off. However, they all remained alive and unharmed.
“There were three brothers. I even remember their last name — Pirizhok. Accordingly, all of them were called “pies”. They came from a successful Ukrainian family — they had a farm, a house, etc. On the day of farewell to Andriy Kozyr, the brothers had affairs, and their parents went to a cafe and died,” says Yakov Lyashenko. When the brothers learned about the tragedy in the Thunderstorm, they immediately arrived and were simply shocked by what they saw.
On October 5, 2023, a third of the village was killed in a thunderstorm. “There were two boys who lost their parents. They did not want to talk or take pictures,” says Lyashenko. Each of the locals has its own grief, because the village is small, everyone knows each other and everyone has died either a relative, or a neighbor, or a close friend. “In this house, the windows no longer burn. And in these too. Many houses no longer turn on the lights because no one lives there anymore. In the Thunderstorm, whole families died,” Jacob recounts the words of a local boy, to whom his parents bent.
A lot of foreign photographers came to Grozo to document the consequences of the arrival. Yakov says that Ukrainian journalists behaved very cautiously. Instead, foreign photographers shot everything in a row. “If foreign photographers were able to climb into a coffin with a camera and take a selfie there, they would do it. They came to shoot cool shots, and they simply do not care about the feelings of relatives and acquaintances of the dead,” Lyashenko shares.
The photographer came to the village several more times — photographed how people choose a place in the cemetery for their loved ones, filmed burials and talked a lot with locals. He also filmed in the morgue of Kharkov, where the bodies of the dead were brought for forensic examination. “We were taken to the morgue to take pictures. A morgue worker cut off a piece of flesh from the body of one woman for analysis. I understand that this is a familiar job for her. Instead, I have the impression that I am in a butcher shop where you are being cut off a piece to sell. For a person shooting in a morgue for the first time, everything looked pretty scary,” says Yakov Lyashenko. The last time the photographer came to Grozo was in winter. Visited a family that lives near a cafe. They repaired the house, partially replaced the roof, built a new fence.
Yakov Lyashenko says that he was very touched by the cruelty and cynicism of local residents who pointed missiles at his native village. “For the sake of curiosity, I went to the page of Denis Kozyr, who organized the reburial of my father. He has a photo on social networks with the man who brought the rocket. There they embrace,” the photographer says. “That is, the people who brought the rocket to the village, once lived there and knew exactly all its inhabitants. It is a kind of special cynicism, to ask people about going in en masse, to point rockets there, knowing that they will all die there. I was very impressed by it.”
Yakov Liashenko— Ukrainian photographer from Kharkov. He began his professional career in 2012. After the beginning of the full-scale invasion, he worked as a fixer for well-known photographers and in parallel documented the events of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He was a freelance photojournalist at EPA Agency and AP. He currently serves in the National Guard.
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