Russia has admitted to carrying out a ballistic missile attack on the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy that killed at least 34 civilians and injured a further 119, but blamed Kyiv for the casualties.
Moscow’s defence ministry said on Monday it had struck a gathering of Ukrainian military commanders the previous day and claimed, without evidence, to have killed more than 60 servicemen.
It did not comment directly on the civilian death toll, but said Ukraine’s government was “continuing to use the Ukrainian population as a human shield by placing military facilities and holding events with members of the military in the centre of a thickly populated city”.
The strikes with two ballistic missiles on Palm Sunday, a week before Ukrainians and Russians alike celebrate Orthodox Easter, are a further blow to US President Donald Trump’s attempts to broker an unconditional 30-day ceasefire.
While Ukraine has agreed to Trump’s offer, Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken a hard line and shown no signs of stepping back from his maximalist demands for ending his three-year invasion of the country.
Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday that Russia’s military “exclusively carries out strikes against military and military-related targets”.
The Russian admission of the missile strike also appeared to contradict Trump’s claims on Sunday evening that Russia had “made a mistake” in the attack.
Russian state media claimed Ukraine had somehow staged the attack itself to sabotage Moscow’s talks with the US, or that Ukrainian air defences were to blame for the civilian deaths.
There is no evidence that any active-duty Ukrainian military personnel were killed in the strike on Sumy, which borders the Russian Kursk region where Moscow’s forces have largely driven back a Ukrainian incursion launched in August last year. But a Ukrainian MP from the ruling party of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party and a city mayor in the Sumy region alleged that a local Ukrainian military ceremony had been arranged for Sunday morning.
The lawmaker, Mariana Bezuhla, who serves on the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, and the mayor of Konotop, Artem Semenikhin, accused Sumy regional governor Volodymyr Artyukh of organising the event for the 117th Separate Territorial Defence Brigade.
Bezuhla and Semenikhin blamed the governor for putting lives at risk by organising it on one of the biggest religious holidays of the year and in a crowded city.
In a Facebook post, Bezuhla showed what she claimed to be an invitation to the event, showing it had been set for around the same time that the missile attack occurred.
In a Facebook live video on Sunday, Semenikhin said Artyukh “helped [Russia] justify their terrorist attack, a genocidal attack on us, Ukrainians”.
Artyukh, who was appointed by Zelenskyy to head the north-eastern border region in April 2023, could not be reached for comment.
There have been several instances during the war in which large Ukrainian military gatherings were targeted by Russian air strikes, some leading to mass casualties of army personnel and others of civilians.
The Sumy regional prosecutor’s office and security service department said in a statement that they had opened a war crime investigation into Sunday’s Russian missile attack. Additionally, officials from the security service headquarters in Kyiv and Zelenskyy’s office confirmed that the agencies were also looking into the allegations that a military awards ceremony had been planned for Sunday morning in Sumy.
Trump said: “I think it was terrible, and I was told they made a mistake. But I think it’s a horrible thing. I think the whole war is a horrible thing [ . . . ] For that war to have started is an abuse of power.
“That war is a shame. Millions of people are dead that should be alive. Cities are being destroyed all over Ukraine. The whole culture is gone. It’s very certainly very severely hurt,” he added.
“You know the chapels, the churches, the spirals — all of the things they had in Ukraine were among the most beautiful anywhere in the world. Most of them are knocked down and blown up into a million pieces.”
Zelenskyy said Russia could only be stopped through “tangible sanctions against sectors that finance the Russian killing machine”.
In an interview filmed in his hometown of Kryvyi Rih at the site of a deadly Russian missile attack a week earlier that killed 20 civilians, including 11 children, Zelenskyy said that Trump should come to Ukraine to get a close look at Russia’s war for himself.
“Please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead. Come, look, and then let’s — let’s move with a plan how to finish the war,” Zelenskyy told the CBS 60 Minutes programme that was recorded before the Sumy attack and aired on Sunday.
He added: “You will understand with whom you have a deal. You will understand what Putin did.”
