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

Five people, including three young children, have been killed in the latest overnight Russian attacks on Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, as United States-led efforts to end the nearly war continue to progress at a slow, bogged-down pace.

The Ukrainian leader 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 and seriously 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 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.

Mother fights for life

Volodymyr Bielyi, the mayor of Bohodukhiv, about 22km (13 miles) from the Russian border, announced on Facebook that the town would observe three days of mourning.

“We have lost what is most precious – our future,” he said, adding that the children’s mother was fighting for her life in hospital.

“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.

Two killed in Sumy

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

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

Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Telegram that a railway station in the Dnipropetrovsk ⁠region had been attacked early on ⁠Wednesday, damaging locomotives, rail cars and infrastructure, in what he described as “another targeted attack on civilian logistics ‌and critical infrastructure”.

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.”

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 Defence Ministry said its forces shot down 108 Ukrainian drones across Russian territory overnight.