At least five people, including a one-year-old child, his mother and grandmother, were killed yesterday in a nighttime Russian drone strike that hit the northern Ukrainian city of Pryluky, officials said, hours after US President Donald Trump spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Six drones hit a residential area in the city shortly before dawn, authorities said.
The child killed was the grandson of an emergency responder, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
Photo: Reuters
“One of the rescuers arrived to respond to the aftermath right at his own home,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram. “It turned out that a Shahed drone hit his house.”
The mother of the one-year-old killed in Pryluky was a police officer named Daryna Shyhyda, Ukrainian National Police said.
“Today our hearts are scorched by pain,” the police force wrote on Telegram. “This is not just a loss — it is three generations of life uprooted.”
Zelenskiy said 103 drones and one ballistic missile targeted multiple Ukrainian regions overnight.
“This is another massive strike,” Zelenskiy said. “It is yet another reason to impose the strongest possible sanctions and apply pressure collectively.”
According to Trump, Putin said “very strongly” that Russia will retaliate for Ukraine’s stunning weekend drone attacks on Russian military airfields.
Russia yesterday said it would respond to those attacks as and when its military sees fit.
Ukraine used drones to strike Russian heavy bomber planes at air bases in Siberia and the far north, and Russia also accused it of blowing up rail bridges in the south of the country, killing seven people, which Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called an act of state terrorism.
Despite the attacks inside Russia, Peskov said that Putin at a meeting on Wednesday supported the view of Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov that working-level contacts with Ukraine on a potential peace agreement should continue.
In the drone strikes in Siberia at the weekend, the US assessed that up to 20 warplanes were hit and about 10 were destroyed, about half the number estimated by Zelenskiy.
Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Ryabkov said that none of the equipment was destroyed and that the damaged planes would be restored.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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