KYIV: Ukraine said on Tuesday that a Russian overnight drone strike had killed a family of four in the northeastern Sumy region.
Oleg Grygorov, the head of the regional military administration, said Russian forces had hit a residential building in the village of Chernechchyna, in the Krasnopillia community.
“A couple with two young children lived in this house. Unfortunately, no one managed to escape,” Grygorov wrote on the Telegram platform.
“Rescuers (recovered) the bodies of four deceased people from under the rubble – parents and their sons, six and four years old,” he said.
“This is a terrible and irreparable loss for the entire community and the region.”
Russia’s defense ministry said it had “intercepted and destroyed” 81 Ukrainian drones overnight.
The governor of Volgograd, Andrey Bocharov, said the Russian military had repelled a “massive” Ukrainian drone attack over the southern region.
“According to preliminary information, there was no damage to structures or injuries,” Bocharov said.
On Sunday, a massive Russian drone and missile attack against Ukraine lasting 12 hours killed at least four people in the capital Kyiv, including a 12-year-old girl, and left dozens injured across the country.
Ukraine said it had been targeted by 595 drones and 48 missiles that night, most of which were shot down by air defenses.
The fighting in Ukraine is essentially taking place in the east and Russia controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory.
On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called up 135,000 men for routine military service, the country’s biggest autumn conscription drive since 2016.
Conscripts are expected to serve for a year at a military base inside Russia, not to fight in Ukraine, although there have been reports of conscripted men being sent to the front line.
Since launching his full-scale military assault on Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has put Russia on a war footing, boosting military spending to levels unseen since the Soviet era and expanding the size of the army.