FALSE: At the “Park Hotel”, which was shelled by Russia, foreign mercenaries were staying

Russian news outlets are spreading information that on the evening of January 10, Russian forces launched a missile strike on Kharkiv’s “Park Hotel,” where foreign fighters were staying. They also claim that as a result of the attack, the transport on which the fighters were supposedly moving was destroyed.

However, this is false. Foreign journalists from the “Anadolu” news agency, who were in the building during the shelling, confirmed that there were no military personnel at the hotel, only staff and guests.

Russian media did not provide any confirmation that military personnel were staying at the hotel. In the video footage from the scene, there are no people in military uniforms, and most of the casualties are women between the ages of 23 and 71.

Instead, the mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, and foreign journalists who were in the building during the shelling confirmed that the hotel was exclusively used by civilians. According to the head of the Investigative Department of the National Police in the Kharkiv region, Serhii Bolvinov, journalist Davit Kachkachishvili and photographer Ozge Elif Kizil from the Turkish news agency “Anadolu” arrived in Ukraine on January 6 to report on the Ukrainian-Russian war and stayed at the “Park Hotel.”

At the time of the shelling, they were in the hotel, in their rooms. “This is a brazen attack on a regular hotel; we always stayed there during our trips, it’s almost downtown, and we didn’t expect the Russians to hit it. There were no military personnel there,” Kachkachishvili said. As a result of the attack, the journalists’ car was also damaged.

The Chief of the Main Department of the National Police in the Kharkiv region, Volodymyr Tymoshko, also stated that Russia deliberately shelled civilians, including journalists. “Military personnel never lived in this hotel; almost everyone in Kharkiv knows that. This hotel was used by journalists. It was a well-known fact. At the time of the strike, foreign journalists, including those from Turkey, were staying in the hotel. Therefore, I believe that this strike by the Russian Federation was aimed precisely at the media,” Tymoshko reported.

To justify strikes on civilian infrastructure, Russian media often create fabrications about hitting “mercenary headquarters” or “Ukrainian Armed Forces deployment points.” Earlier, we debunked the fake that a Ukrainian Armed Forces base was destroyed in Romny, Sumy region.