Russian strike kills father, 3 children in Ukraine, wounds pregnant mother

At least 10 people, including five young children, have been killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine, authorities said, as United States-led efforts to end the nearly four-year war continue to progress at a slow, bogged-down pace.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday that a Russian drone had struck a private family home in the town of Bohodukhiv in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region late on Tuesday, killing four – a man and three children – and injuring their pregnant mother, the sole survivor.

The Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office said the strike completely destroyed the house, trapping the family beneath the rubble.

It said the three children were killed – twin boys aged two and their one-year-old sister – along with their father, 34.

The children’s mother, who is 35 weeks pregnant, was pulled alive from the rubble by rescue teams, suffering from blast injuries, a traumatic brain injury, burns and hearing loss, prosecutors said.

Images released by Ukraine’s emergency service showed firefighters battling a blaze in a destroyed house, with smoke rising through the beams of the shattered roof.

Volodymyr Bielyi, the mayor of Bohodukhiv, a city about 22km (14 miles) from the Russian border, announced on Facebook that the city would observe three days of mourning.

“We have lost what is most precious – our future,” he said.

“There are no words to console the family; there is no prayer that could heal the heart of a mother who has lost her children,” he said.

Kharkiv’s regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said the family had been attacked during their first night in the house, after having moved to the town in an attempt to escape constant Russian shelling.

The mother was released from hospital after receiving treatment for her injuries and minor burns, he said.

Two killed in Sumy

At least two more children were killed in a separate overnight Russian drone attack in the northeastern Sumy region, where several districts were targeted over the last 24 hours, Ukrainian authorities said.

Sixteen people have been injured in the latest attacks, according to authorities.

Zelenskyy said that since Tuesday night, 129 long-range Russian drones had been launched at Ukraine, striking targets that included a hospital in Zaporizhzhia, a railway depot in Sumy’s Konotop that damaged a firefighting train, and other areas in Dnipro and Poltava.

Ukraine’s air force said 112 of the Russian drones fired at its territory had been shot down or neutralised.

On Wednesday, Ukraine’s ⁠air defences repelled a Russian missile attack on the western region of Lviv, ⁠Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said in a post on Telegram, adding that no reports of injury or damage had been received.

Hours earlier, Zelenskyy’s adviser Oleksii Kuleba said on Telegram that a railway station in the Dnipropetrovsk ⁠region had been attacked, damaging locomotives, rail cars and infrastructure in what he described as “another targeted attack on civilian logistics ‌and critical infrastructure”.

In a separate attack later on Wednesday, Russian strikes killed four civilians in three different localities in the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region, Oleksandr Ganzha, the regional governor, said.

Ganzha, writing on Telegram, said the attacks occurred near the town of Synelnykove, east of the regional centre of Dnipro.

In one attack, a man was killed and his wife wounded. In a different locality, a couple and their 45-year-old son were killed, and another man was wounded. A woman was hurt in a third village.

Russia ‘not preparing to stop’

Zelenskyy said that the ongoing attacks showed that Russia was “not preparing to stop; they are preparing to continue fighting”.

“Each such Russian strike undermines trust in everything being done diplomatically to end this war and, time and again, proves that only strong pressure on Russia and clear security guarantees for Ukraine are the real key to stopping the killings,” he said.

“As long as pressure on the aggressor is insufficient and as long as security for us – for Ukraine – is not guaranteed, nothing else works.”

Ukrainian and Russian officials have met with US mediators in Abu Dhabi in recent weeks amid a concerted push by Washington to negotiate an end to the war.

Zelenskyy has said the administration of US President Donald Trump is seeking a solution to end the war before the summer.

Ukraine strikes Russian targets

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s General Staff said its aviation, missile troops and artillery had targeted nine areas of Russian personnel concentration, one drone control point, six artillery systems, five command posts and “one other important target”.

Russian authorities said a Ukrainian drone attack had caused a fire at an industrial plant in the city of Volgograd, with the region’s governor, Andrei Bocharov, saying that drone fragments had also damaged an apartment building.

In a separate statement, the Russian Ministry of Defence said its forces shot down 108 Ukrainian drones across Russian territory overnight.