Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is planning to announce preparations for a spring presidential election alongside a referendum on a prospective peace deal with Russia.
Details on the preparations will be made public on February 24, according to the Financial Times, which cited Ukrainian and European officials involved in the planning.
Reuters reported last week that under a framework being discussed by US and Ukrainian negotiators, any peace deal would be submitted to a referendum by Ukrainian voters, who would simultaneously vote in national elections, adding that officials had discussed the possibility that the national election and referendum could occur in May.
It comes as a Russian drone strike on the Ukrainian city of Bogodukhiv killed three children and their father.
Two one-year-old boys and a two-year-old girl died as a result of an enemy strike on a private residential house in the eastern city that sits close to Russia’s border.
A 34-year-old man, identified by prosecutors as the children’s father, who was also in the house, died from his wounds.
‘As a result of the strike, the house was completely destroyed and caught fire, and the family was trapped under the rubble,’ prosecutors said in a statement on Telegram.
A woman, identified by prosecutors as the children’s mother who is eight months pregnant, was injured in the blast and sustained ‘a traumatic brain injury, acoustic barotrauma, and thermal burns’, prosecutors said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky intends to announce the plan for presidential elections and a referendum on February 24, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday
Ukrainian firefighters extinguish a fire after a Russian bombing raid on the city of Sloviansk, Ukraine, February 10
A mother and her 11-year-old daughter were among three people killed in a Russian aerial bomb attack on the city of Sloviansk in Donetsk Oblast
The regional prosecutor’s office said it has launched a pre-trial investigation ‘into the commission of a war crime resulting in the death of civilians’.
Bogodukhiv is located in the Kharkiv region, where Russian forces have recently stepped up attacks on transport and energy infrastructure.
A mother and her 11-year-old daughter were among three people killed in a Russian aerial bomb attack on the city of Sloviansk in Donetsk Oblast yesterday.
The exact number of casualties is unclear but 18 people have sustained injuries, including a seven-year-old girl.
An overnight drone attack sparked a fire on the territory of an industrial facility in Russia’s southern region of Volgograd.
‘Air defence units of the Russian Ministry of Defence are repelling a massive terrorist attack by unmanned aerial vehicles on energy and civilian infrastructure facilities in the Volgograd region,’ the governor, Andrei Bocharov, said on Telegram.
The attack caused damage to an apartment in a residential building, drone debris also fell on the territory of a kindergarten.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Ukrainian and Russian officials have held US-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi aimed at ending Moscow’s four-year invasion.
The two sides conducted a prisoner swap last week, but an agreement to end the nearly four-year war seems a way off.
According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU), around 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since Russia invaded in February 2022.
HRMMU said that 2025 was the deadliest year with more than 2,500 civilians killed.
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