A Russian drone hits a park full of families in the Kharkiv region and kills six people, three of them children

The park in Nova Vodolaha is where families in the village go with their children. On Monday a Russian drone came down in the middle of it.

Regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said six people were killed, three of them children, and 15 were injured, as of October 19. His updated accounting named three women, aged 28, 34 and 36, and two girls, aged eleven years and fourteen months. Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi said the drone hit a park where families were playing with children, and he shared a blurred photograph of a child’s body in a stroller. Seven of the injured are children. A cafe nearby was damaged, and emergency crews worked through the wreckage while ambulances carried the wounded to hospitals.

Nova Vodolaha sits southwest of the city of Kharkiv, in a region that has been shelled and struck from the air for four years. Monday’s strike was not aimed at a power station or a rail yard, the targets Moscow usually claims. It fell on a village park in the middle of the day, and the photographs Ukrainian officials released showed exactly that: a playground, a stroller, and rescue workers.

The strike came with a wider count attached. United Nations human rights monitors warned on Monday that Russia’s bombardment has pushed civilian casualties to some of the highest levels since the full scale invasion began in February 2022. Civilian deaths and injuries surged 85 percent in September compared with a year earlier, by the monitors’ count, as of October 19. In Kyiv alone, civilians were killed or injured on 22 of the 30 days of September, the highest frequency recorded in any month of the war.

The same afternoon in Washington, President Trump told reporters that Russia has been fine on Ukraine and has not been doing much, and that President Zelensky should be replaced as negotiator. In Nova Vodolaha, the day’s work was burying a one year old.

The picture with this story is an illustration.