Russian drone strike kills five in Pryluky, including a 1-year-old child

Russian drone strike kills five in Pryluky, including a 1-year-old child

At least five people were killed and nine others wounded when Russian drones struck the northern Ukrainian city of Pryluky before dawn on June 5, 2025, Ukrainian officials said. The attack hit a residential area, and one of the dead was a 1-year-old child. The child’s mother and grandmother also died, turning the strike into a three-generation family loss that Ukrainian officials quickly highlighted as another example of the war’s civilian toll.

Authorities said six drones hit the city shortly before sunrise. The dead child was identified by Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko as the grandson of the local fire chief. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the fire chief, Oleksandr Lebid, arrived to respond to the aftermath at his own home and found that a Shahed drone had struck the house. The child’s mother, Daryna Shyhyda, was a police officer. Ukraine’s National Police said the family had been uprooted by fear of previous Russian attacks.

The AP account places the strike in the wider context of a larger overnight assault. Zelenskyy said Russia launched 103 drones and one ballistic missile across multiple regions, including Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Odesa, Sumy, Dnipro and Kherson. The same night, Kharkiv was hit in a separate drone attack that wounded 19 people, including children, a pregnant woman and a 93-year-old woman, while Kherson was also shelled. Those parallel attacks underscore how Russian air strikes were affecting multiple Ukrainian regions at once, not just one front-line city.

Pryluky lies about 100 kilometers east of Kyiv and had a prewar population of around 50,000. AP reported that it is far from the front line and contains no known military assets, which makes the residential strike especially significant. Local resident Liudmyla Horbunova told AP that Shyhyda had moved with her son to her parents’ house just days earlier because she feared attacks in Kyiv. Her remark captures the fear driving many civilians to relocate within the country, only to remain within reach of drone warfare.

The attack also landed on a day of heavy diplomatic activity. It came hours after U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and after a Ukrainian delegation in Washington had pressed for greater U.S. pressure on Moscow. Zelenskyy called the strike another reason to impose the strongest possible sanctions. The facts released by Ukrainian officials show a fast-moving military and diplomatic backdrop, but the local consequence was immediate and devastating: a family destroyed and a small city left to clear debris from homes hit while people slept.