A Russian drone crashed into a house in eastern Ukraine, killing three small children and their father, officials said yesterday, in a strike President Volodymyr Zelensky said undermined diplomacy as Washington presses for a peace deal.

The children’s pregnant mother was fighting for her life in hospital with severe burns, Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko posted on X: “An entire family was wiped out in a single act of Russian terror.”

According to local prosecutors, the drone hit the residential building in the town of Bohodukhiv, to the west of Ukraine’s second-largest city Kharkiv, late on Tuesday.

“As a result of the strike, the house was completely destroyed and engulfed in flames, and the family was trapped under the rubble,” the Kharkiv Region Prosecutor’s Office said on the Telegram messaging app yesterday.

Regional governor Oleh Syniehubov described the victims as two 2-year-old boys, a 1-year-old girl and a 34-year-old man. He did not specify whether the boys were twins. Officials said the family had only just moved into the town.

Images posted on Telegram by Ukraine’s emergency service showed firefighters battling a blaze in a house, with smoke rising through the wooden beams of the roof.

There was no immediate comment from Russia on the attack. Moscow has denied intentionally targeting civilians during the war although its attacks have killed thousands of them since it invaded at full scale in February 2022. Ukraine has also hit civilian targets in Russia or Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine during the war, though on a far smaller scale.