KYIV, Ukraine, Feb 11, (AP): A Russian drone smashed into a home in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region overnight, killing a father and his three small children and seriously wounding their mother who is 35 weeks pregnant, officials said Wednesday. The strike completely destroyed the brick house and set it on fire, with the family trapped under the rubble, according to the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office.

The 34-year-old father and his three children - twin boys aged 2 and their 1-year-old sister - were killed, while rescue workers pulled the mother alive from the rubble, prosecutors said. She sustained blast injuries, a traumatic brain injury, burns and hearing loss, they said. During the almost four years since Russia invaded its neighbor, and despite a new push over the past year in US-led peace efforts, Ukrainian civilians have endured constant aerial attacks.

Last year was the deadliest for civilians in Ukraine since 2022 as Russia intensified its aerial barrages behind the front line, according to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in the country. The war killed 2,514 civilians and injured 12,142 in Ukraine in 2025 - 31% higher than in 2024, it said. The drone that struck the Kharkiv town of Bohodukhiv was identified as a Geran-2, a Russian-made version of an Iranian Shahed drone.

"We lost what is most precious - our future,” Bohodukhiv mayor Volodymyr Bielyi wrote on his Facebook page. "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.” Bielyi said the mother is fighting for her life in hospital and announced three days of mourning, when national flags will be lowered and all entertainment and organized public events will be cancelled.

"We will endure. We will remember. We will never forgive this horror on our land,” Bielyi wrote. Bohodukhiv had a pre-war population of 15,000. It is located some 22 kilometers (13 miles) from the Russian border.

It wasn't immediately clear whether there was any Ukrainian military infrastructure near the house. "Each such Russian strike undermines trust in everything being done through diplomacy to end this war, and again and again proves that only strong pressure on Russia and clear security guarantees for Ukraine are the real key to stopping the killings,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on social media. Ukraine has accused Russian forces of committing countless war crimes since the start of the war, and European institutions have made efforts to hold Russia accountable.