Residents of Sumy on Monday grieved the victims of one of the deadliest attacks of the war as Russia denied targeting civilians and US President Donald Trump resumed his onslaught against Ukraine’s leader.
A day after two missiles killed at least 35 people, people laid flowers beside a destroyed university building as workers dug through the rubble.
“We used to walk here all the time,” said Igor Koloshchuk, stood by the makeshift memorial with his wife Tetyana.
“We came to pay our respects,” Tetyana said, adding she felt “shock, incomprehension, and probably hatred.”
Authorities said the dead included two boys aged 11 and 17. But Russia said its missiles hit a meeting of army commanders, accusing Ukraine of using civilians as a “human shield”.
Russia’s attack drew international condemnation.
The US president, who is pushing for a ceasefire, called it a “horrible thing” and a “mistake” by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, but also targeted President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump said the Ukrainian leader shared the blame for “millions of people dead” with Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and former US president Joe Biden.
Russia rejects blame
Commenting on the Sumy strike for the first time, Russia’s defense ministry said its army launched two ballistic Iskander-M missiles at “the place of a meeting of command staff”, claiming to have killed 60 Ukrainian soldiers.
The Kremlin denied targeting civilians or making any kind of “mistake”.
“Our army hits only military and military-related targets,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
The ministry appeared to concede there were civilian casualties, but blamed Ukraine.
“The Kyiv regime continues to use the Ukrainian population as a human shield, placing military facilities and holding events with the participation of soldiers in the center of a densely populated city,” the ministry said.
Russia has made similar accusations during the war.
Conservative independent estimates say however that thousands of civilians have died as Russian missiles have hit Ukrainian apartment blocks, hospitals, schools, train stations and other civilian areas.
‘Mountains of corpses’
Sumy’s residents recalled the horror of the strikes.
“It was chaos. There were mountains of corpses,” recalled Artem Selianyn, a combat medic, who ran from his home to help, despite his family’s flat being severely damaged in the attack.
The 47-year-old said one of the first victims he treated was a young woman working at a mobile coffee shop who was bleeding from an artery after her leg was hit by shrapnel.
“My shoes were covered in blood. I haven’t cleaned them yet, it’s the blood of the wounded,” he said.