Russian drone strike kills two civilians on moped in Kharkiv Oblast
A Russian FPV drone struck a moped carrying a civilian man and woman in the Kharkiv region on the afternoon of July 4, 2025, killing them both instantly, according to regional police. The incident took place on a road in the Vovchansk hromada – a local government area that includes one or more nearby settlements.
Investigators have opened criminal proceedings under Part 2 of Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which pertains to war crimes.
By way of background, the residents of the Kharkiv Oblast constantly suffer from Russian shelling.
In an earlier attack, Russians injured a six-year-old girl in their first-person view (FPV) drone strike on a civilian car in the Kharkiv Oblast at around 12:00 p.m. on 2 August, according to the Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor’s Office.
A civilian car was driving along a street in the village of Ivano-Shyichyne in the Bohodukhiv District. At the moment of the strike, a man and his two children – a six-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son – were in the car.
Russian forces also launched two missiles at the village of Vasyshcheve in the Kharkiv District at noon on July 30, killing one person and injuring eight others, including firefighters, according to the Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor’s Office and Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration.
Russians hit a distribution center housing three businesses, including a supermarket. A large fire broke out. The attack killed a security guard. Five people – three men and two women – sustained injuries. Three firefighters were also injured while extinguishing the fire.
Early reports indicated Russia used two S-300/S-400 missiles.
On August 1, the Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor’s Office reported that Russians carried out the attack at around 1:15 p.m. on the village of Lisna Stinka in the Kupiansk District. The Russian military killed a 75-year-old woman in that attack.
Moreover, one drone dropped munitions that injured two men aged 62 and 64 in the village of Tokarivka in the Derhachi hromada. Medics took the men to a hospital.
ZMINA continues to report on the ongoing international crimes in the Kharkiv Oblast.
Earlier, Bohdan Bernatskyy, a member of the Sanctions Policy Working Group of the Crimean Platform Expert Network, revealed at the Third Parliamentary Summit in Latvia that over 1,300 Russian military companies and 2 million industrial workers continue to operate, many without international restrictions.
As is known, including China, North Korea, India, and Brazil, assist Moscow in killing citizens of Ukraine in Russia’s war, including funding the Russian budget through trade.
The European Union intends to push for sanctions against China over its support for Russia in the war against Ukraine. An unnamed EU diplomat, in comments to a Politico journalist, said that the EU made this move following a July report by Reuters, which revealed that Russia had secretly obtained Chinese engines for drones.
Companies reportedly shipped the engines to Russia via front companies under the label of “industrial refrigeration units” to circumvent Western sanctions.
The report raised an alarm in Brussels. Fifteen EU member states contacted Beijing about the deliveries, but China either denied involvement or refused to respond.
Previously, Reuters reported that Russian energy giant Gazprom’s average daily natural gas supplies to Europe increased by 37% in July from a month earlier, when maintenance work reduced them.
Reuters also reported that a top aide to President Donald Trump on Sunday accused India of effectively financing Russia’s war in Ukraine by purchasing oil from Moscow, after the U.S. leader escalated pressure on New Delhi to stop buying Russian oil.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump stated on his social media platform Truth Social that he plans to significantly increase tariffs on imports from India due to its active trade in Russian oil.
He said that India “is not only buying massive amounts of Russian oil”, but also selling it on the open market for big profits.
“They don’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian war machine. Because of this, I will be substantially raising the tariff paid by India to the USA,” the President stated.
India has become the world’s largest buyer of seaborne Russian oil, purchasing it at a discount and boosting its imports from almost zero to about a third of its total oil imports.
U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said that implementing secondary sanctions against countries that purchase Russian oil is an “obvious step” toward ending the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine.
“Secondary sanctions and tariffs against those that are paying for this war — like China, India, and Brazil — by buying the oil that Russia is producing, is an obvious next step to try and bring this war to an end,” Matt Whitaker, the US ambassador to NATO, told Bloomberg Television. “This is really going to hit them where it counts, and that is in their main revenue source, which is the sale of oil to these countries.”
