Five people, all members of a priest’s family, were killed in a house fire in the Moscow region on Friday, police say.
“Seven others were saved during efforts to extinguish the fire,” a police spokesman told RIA Novosti.
The blaze broke out in a two-storey private house near Sergiyev Posad early on Friday.
Firefighters are still battling the fire.
Russia has an extremely poor fire safety record. Some 20,000 people die in fires across the country annually. In the United States, with more than twice the population, the figure is around 3,400 deaths a year.