A family of four, including two children aged six and four, were killed when a Russian drone hit a residential building in the village of Chernechchyna in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region, regional Governor Oleh Hryhorov said on Tuesday.
Hryhorov said the drone strike, which took place in the early hours of Tuesday, had come so suddenly that none of the building’s residents had even had time to seek shelter. He called the resulting deaths “a terrible and irreparable loss for the entire community and region” and “a tragedy that we will never forget or forgive”.
Elsewhere in the Sumy region, Hryhorov said that a 60-year-old woman had also died in a Russian drone strike near the village of Shalyhyne on Monday, adding that although she had survived the initial impact and was rushed to hospital, she had later succumbed to her injuries.
Hyrhorov said there had been 54 incidents of Russian shelling of some 23 villages in the Sumy region over the past 24 hours, with four communities suffering damage to residential and non-residential buildings and various infrastructure facilities. A further 18 people had to be evacuated from an area near the Russian border during an air raid alert, which lasted for over 17 hours, he added.
Meanwhile, three settlements in Russia’s southern Volgograd region were left without power due to an attack by Ukrainian drones, state-owned news agency TASS reported on Tuesday, adding that Russian air defences had destroyed 81 Ukrainian drones overnight over the Volgograd and Rostov regions.