Russian drone strike kills Ukrainian father and his 3 young children, seriously wounds pregnant mother

A Russian drone struck a home in Ukraine’s northeast Kharkiv region, killing a 34-year-old former Ukrainian soldier along with his three young children, and seriously wounding his heavily pregnant wife, Oleh Syniehubov, head of the regional government in Kharkiv, said Wednesday.

The local administration said in a social media post that Grygoriy Shykula was killed along with his 2-year-old twin boys and their 1-year old sister. Their mother, who is 35 weeks pregnant, was left in critical condition. 

The drone completely destroyed the house in the city of Bohodukhiv, trapping the family under the rubble. Emergency services were able to rescue the mother from the debris. She sustained blast injuries, burns and a traumatic brain injury, according to regional prosecutors. 

The local Zolochiv village council said the father was a former member of the Ukrainian military and that the family had moved recently to Bohodukhiv, which is only about 13 miles from the border with Russia. The city, which had a pre-war population of around 15,000, has faced constant Russian aerial attacks in recent weeks.

“The Russians once again attacked the private sector of Bohodukhiv with a strike drone. The impact hit a residential building, which was completely destroyed,” the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said in a post shared on the Telegram messaging app. 

Russia has hit Ukrainian civilian infrastructure throughout its full-scale invasion of the neighboring nation, which began almost four years ago on Feb. 24, 2022. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly called for Ukraine’s partners to provide more and more sophisticated air defense systems to help protect civilians.

According to an analysis by the Kiel Institute in Germany, total foreign military aid for Ukraine shrank by 15% in 2025.

“Each such Russian strike undermines the credibility of everything being done in diplomacy to end this war, and proves again and again that tough pressure on Russia and clear security guarantees for Ukraine are the real key to ending the killings,” Zelenskyy said in a social media post Wednesday morning. “As long as the pressure on the aggressor is insufficient and as long as security for us, for Ukraine, is not guaranteed, everything else does not work.”

Russia launched 129 drones at Ukraine on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, killing at least five people and damaging key energy infrastructure around the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian officials said.

The ongoing strikes come after a brief “energy truce” announced by President Trump in late January, as his administration prepared to broker a second round of trilateral negotiations with Ukraine and Russia.

That round of talks, in Abu Dhabi, yielded the first prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia in five months and a vague agreement to continue negotiating, but no apparent progress on the major hurdles to a wider peace deal.

Zelenskyy told reporters last week that the Trump administration had given Ukraine and Russia a June deadline to reach a deal to end the war, and he said Mr. Trump had warned that U.S. pressure on both sides would increase if they failed to do so.

“The Americans are proposing the parties end the war by the beginning of this summer and will probably put pressure on the parties precisely according to this schedule,” Zelenskyy said.

Russian officials said, meanwhile, that a Ukrainian drone attack caused a fire at an industrial plant in the Russian city of Volgograd on Wednesday, forcing eight Russian airports to briefly suspend flights.