‘Panic, screams, dead everywhere’ — Sumy in shock after double-tap missile

SUMY — Valeriia Maksimova and her husband woke up to the first explosion in central Sumy at around 10 a.m. Their house was damaged by the blast wave.

The 38-year-old rushed to the kitchen to start clearing the rubble when the second explosion struck, throwing her three meters away into the corridor. Their apartment was all but destroyed.

“Everything happened so quickly,” Maksimova told the Kyiv Independent the day after the attack.

Maksimova, her husband, and their 19-year-old son were lucky to survive.

Russia’s morning double-tap missile strike on the northeastern city of Sumy killed 35 civilians and wounded over 110 in what became the deadliest attack in many months. Two children were among the killed.

Russia had deployed cluster munitions in its second attack that occurred a few minutes after the first, inflicting deliberate casualties on civilians in downtown Sumy on Palm Sunday, local authorities told the Kyiv Independent.

Outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink confirmed Russia’s deployment of the cluster munitions on April 13.

Maksimova’s husband, Volodymyr, remembers witnessing half a body outside, saying that “it was impossible to watch.” For him, it is a shock that the apartment where he had lived all his life — and where he raised his only son — was now without windows and covered in rubble.

“We could have never imagined that such things would happen,” Volodymyr said, describing what he saw outside as “panic, screams, and hysteria.”

“The whole street was covered with corpses and wounded people,” he added.

The deadly attack comes as the U.S. tries to end the three-year-long war in Ukraine at all costs, pushing for a rushed peace deal. Two days before the attack, U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg to discuss “aspects of the Ukrainian settlement.”

U.S. President Donald Trump, who has long stood by his belief that Russia was serious about peace talks, called the Sumy attack “terrible” but added that Russia conducted it by “mistake” without elaborating further.

The Sumy attack followed another deadly Russian missile strike on the city of Kryvyi Rih in the central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on April 4, which saw 20 people killed, including nine children.

The weak American response to the attacks was contrasted by a frank one from Europe.

European leaders condemned the Russian attack on Sumy as “a war crime,” with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying that he was “appalled” by Moscow’s latest targeting of civilians.

French President Emmanuel Macron called for stronger measures to impose the ceasefire on Russia, echoing President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call.

European countries have also mustard up billions of dollars in military support.

Distrustful of peace talks

From morning up until sundown, relatives and friends of the killed, as well as many locals who were devastated by the strike, dropped by the blast site to lay flowers and toys in tribute to the victims.

Sumy residents who spoke to the Kyiv Independent harshly dismissed the feasibility of peace talks, saying that the attacks have only gotten worse in recent months compared to a year ago. Many said they now live in fear.

They also expressed deep “hatred” toward Russia for continuously launching such deadly attacks.

The attacks in the northeastern areas have intensified following Ukraine’s surprise cross-border incursion into Russia’s adjacent Kursk Oblast, where Ukrainian troops held a nearby town of Sudzha for seven months before they were forced to withdraw in March. Fighting still continues in the border areas.

Emergency workers continued to…