The Russian ballistic missiles hit Sumy at about 10.15 local time on Sunday morning. The city centre was busy with civilians, many of them celebrating Palm Sunday or waiting for a theatre performance. University buildings, homes and a church were among those hit by the two strikes; a crowded bus was also hit, the Kyiv Independent reported. At least 34 people, including two children, were killed, with another 117 injured.
What made the attack so egregious?
A military awards ceremony was reportedly under way in Sumy at the time the missiles hit, and Russia claimed that it had hit a meeting of Ukrainian military leaders. But video and eyewitness evidence suggests this was an attack whose victims were overwhelmingly civilians, with no serious military purpose to the bombing.
“These were civilians doing normal things on a Sunday morning,” Luke Harding said. “Going to church, going to the shops, using public transport. This isn’t the frontline or a tank factory. It’s like aiming a missile at a British high street.” Germany’s incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, described the attack as a “deliberate and calculated war crime”, citing reports that the second missile struck as emergency workers attended to victims of the first.
Ukrainian officials said the second missile appeared to have been filled with cluster munitions – explosives that are dispersed in the air over a large area and are particularly deadly for civilians. They are banned by many countries under an international convention because of their indiscriminate impact but have been used extensively by Russia (and to a lesser extent by Ukraine) during the conflict.
Civilians in Sumy are acutely vulnerable to ballistic missile attack, because of the speed with which the missiles arrive. “It’s about a 15-minute drive from the Russian border,” Luke said. “In Kyiv, you get a bit of warning, you can decide whether to take yourself underground. But there’s no air raid siren somewhere like Sumy – the thing just lands. You can’t hide or fling yourself behind cover – it’s a gruesome game of roulette.”
Is the attack part of a wider pattern?
Last week, a Russian missile hit in Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city of Kryvyi Rih, killing 19 people including nine children. Again, Russia said that it had launched a “precision strike” against a meeting of soldiers and western military instructors at a restaurant, but the bomb hit within a short distance of a playground.
Ukrainian civilian casualties have steadily increased throughout the war, and have risen sharply since ceasefire talks brokered by the US began last month, the United Nations said, with 164 dead and 910 injured – rising 50% in March against February and 71% against the same month last year. The UN also said that loitering munitions – single-use warheads also known as kamikaze drones, designed to hover over potential targets until the optimal opportunity to strike – struck three hospitals in the same period, adding that because multiple drones hit the hospitals they may have been deliberately targeted.
“It is an appalling pattern,” Luke said. “Every week there is a strike like this. We can expect these attacks to continue, and in another week or two weeks we’ll be talking about the same thing somewhere else.”
Why is Russia doing it?
In this analysis piece, Guardian defence editor Dan Sabbagh writes that “a daytime city-centre attack, in the full knowledge that civilians will be present, reflects a Russian culture of impunity that has been allowed to endure without effective challenge”. And while Russia generally insists that such attacks are carried out with some military target in mind, the real purpose is straightforward, Luke said. “The overall strategy now is to immiserate Ukrainians, to the point where they say: we can’t beat Russia, this is pointless. They want them to turn on their government and demand peace on any terms.”
Higher proportions of Ukrainians support a negotiated end to the war than in the early days, with larger numbers prepared to cede some territory to secure peace. But half of the country still says that no territory should be given up under any circumstances. The vast majority believe that Russia will not stop at the territory it already occupies.
There is very little support for any deal that threatens Ukraine’s political independence. But that is what Vladimir Putin is referring to when he says that the “root causes” of the crisis must be removed for a ceasefire to be viable – a commitment to Nato’s future political “neutrality”, with the implication that regime change in Kyiv is a necessary condition.
“I don’t think they will succeed in turning Ukrainians against their government,” Luke said. “But the message is cynical, and really rather chilling – we will continue this war, we are masters of the situation, we can kill civilians, and there is nothing you can do about it.”
How has the US reacted?
Donald Trump is now preoccupied with his chaotic tariff war – but the backdrop of the United States’ new approach to the war in Ukraine remains the crucial context for Russia’s recent actions. “Russia is very confident that there will be no meaningful response from Trump, whatever they do,” Luke said.
After the Kryvyi Rih attack, US ambassador Bridget Brink did not ascribe blame to Russia, simply saying that “a ballistic missile struck”. Brink, who has been in post for three years and is viewed as a staunch advocate for US military assistance to Kyiv, has since announced that she is stepping down, and condemned the Sumy attack more clearly: “Russia launched ballistic missiles on Sumy,” she wrote on social media. “Reports indicate, as in Kryvyi Rih, cluster munitions were used, increasing the devastation and harm to civilians.”
Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, was even clearer in his condemnation: “Today’s Palm Sunday attack by Russian forces on civilian targets in Sumy crosses any line of decency,” he said, adding: “It is why President Trump is working hard to end this war.” Trump himself would only say that he had been told that the Sumy strike was a “mistake”.
How should we interpret those messages?
The fact Brink has spoken more directly now that her departure has been announced tells its own story – while Kellogg appears to have been wholly marginalised. Much more significant was the fact that Steve Witkoff, officially Trump’s Middle East envoy but apparently the man he trusts to deal with Moscow, met with Vladimir Putin for the third time this year on Friday. Reuters reported that Witkoff told Trump the best way to secure a peace deal is to give Russia the Ukrainian land it has illegally annexed.
“Witkoff seems more pro-Kremlin than the Kremlin,” Luke said. “The truth is that America either wants Russia to win, or doesn’t care if Ukraine loses. On a strategic level, they are much more concerned with a wide-ranging reset, covering Greenland, operations in the Arctic, space, sanctions relief for oligarchs, and mutual economic projects in which Ukraine is only a small file.”
Some may still hope that Moscow’s escalation of military operations might irk Trump to the extent that he changes course. But there is so far no evidence that that will happen, Luke said. “When Trump came into office, there was a hope among some people close to Zelenskyy – by no means all of them – that it might be possible to persuade him that he should not accept being treated like a loser by Moscow. But it has become clear that that hope was an illusion.”
