By Agence France-Presse
On Monday, April 14, residents of the Ukrainian city of Sumy grieved the victims of one of the deadliest attacks of the war as Russia denied targeting civilians and U.S. 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, standing 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 U.S. president—who is pushing for a ceasefire—called it a “horrible thing” and a “mistake” by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, but also targeted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump—who had a blazing White House row with Zelensky six weeks ago—said the Ukrainian leader shared the blame for “millions of people dead” with Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and former U.S. president Joe Biden.
“Let’s say Putin number one, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, number two, and Zelensky,” Trump said during a meeting with El Salvador’s president.
“Zelensky was ‘always looking to purchase missiles.’ When you start a war, you got to know that you can win the war. You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size, and then hope that people give you some missiles,” Trump added.
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.
“Our army hits only military and military-related targets,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters, denying allegations of the Kremlin targeting civilians or making any kind of “mistake”.
“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 centre of a densely populated city,” the ministry said, appearing to concede that there were civilian casualties, but blamed Ukraine.
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.
“Only [a] completely deranged scum can do something like this,” Zelensky said of the Sumy strikes on Sunday.
‘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 apartment 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.
Kyiv said the attacks showed that Russia had no intention of halting its invasion, after Putin last month rejected a US call for a ceasefire.
Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff held talks with Putin in Saint Petersburg on April 11 that the Kremlin on Monday (April 14) called “extremely helpful and very effective.”
Ukraine’s European allies strongly condemned the Russian attack however.
France’s foreign ministry said the attack—along with another this month that killed nine children and nine adults in Kryvyi Rig—constituted “war crimes”. Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz also described the attack as “a serious war crime.”
‘Further escalation’
The Kremlin criticised Merz for saying he was open to supplying Ukraine with Taurus missiles.
“He is agitating on the side of toughening his position and in favor of various steps that can—and will—inevitably lead to a further escalation of the Ukraine situation,” Peskov said.
While Trump again criticised Zelensky, a senior official in Kyiv told AFP that Ukraine-US talks in Washington last week on a proposed mineral deal had gone “constructively”.
Separate Russian strikes on the northeastern region of Kharkiv killed four elderly residents, officials said on Monday (April 14). Russia said Ukrainian drone strikes on border villages in the Kursk region killed three people.
Trump envoy says Putin open to ‘permanent peace’ deal with Ukraine
Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy said on Monday, April 14, that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was open to a “permanent peace” deal with Ukraine, following talks seeking to end the more than three-year war.
Witkoff said during a Fox News interview televised on Monday that he sees a peace deal “emerging,” and that two key Putin advisers—Yuri Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev—were in the “compelling meeting.”
“Putin’s request is to get to have a permanent peace here. So beyond the ceasefire, we got an answer to that,” Witkoff said, acknowledging that “it took a while for us to get to this place.”
“I think we might be on the verge of something that would be very, very important for the world at large,” the U.S. envoy added, emphasizing that business deals between Russia and the United States were also part of the negotiations.
“I believe there’s a possibility to reshape the Russian-United States relationship through some very compelling commercial opportunities, that I think give real stability to the region too,” he declared.
Earlier, Putin rejected a joint US-Ukrainian proposal for a full and unconditional pause in the conflict, while the Kremlin has made a truce in the Black Sea conditional on the West lifting certain sanctions.
