At least 34 people have been killed in a Russian missile strike on Ukraine’s northeastern city of Sumy, the interior minister has said. Follow the latest on the Ukraine war.
Sunday 13 April 2025 19:44, UK
As we’ve been reporting today, Russia’s attack on Sumy came not even 48 hours after Donald Trump’s envoy met Vladimir Putin for talks.
Steve Witkoff spoke with Putin for four hours on Friday, Russian state media reported, in the latest round of talks between Washington and Moscow.
While Witkoff may “have the desire for peace”, he is not an “experienced peace negotiator”, Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow for the Atlantic Council thinktank, told us.
She also believes the attack on Sumy was a “signal” to the rest of the world, given it came so soon after Witkoff’s talks with Putin.
“If Russia were a country willing to show goodwill, it would be very easy not to strike Ukraine,” she said, speaking to our presenter Barbara Serra.
“It is an incredibly provocative act, one that Russia didn’t need to conduct for any military reasons.
“This was a signal to Ukraine, to the Americans and to the rest of the world.”
The Ukrainian president has warned Russia’s attack today is further proof that Moscow is “not afraid”, one month on from rejecting a US ceasefire plan.
“They do not stop attacking,” he posted on social media.
“They do not stop spreading hatred through their state propaganda.
“Only pressure – only decisive action – can change this.”
As we reported earlier, 15 children are said to be among 117 people injured in the attack on Sumy today.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry has now said that includes a child born in 2025.
The baby girl was “wounded” in the attack, the ministry said on social media.
Donald Trump underwent a routine physical exam on Friday, and the results have now been released.
According to White House physician Captain Sean Barbella, the president – the oldest to ever assume office – is in excellent condition.
“President Trump exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State,” Barbella wrote in a report.
By Diana Magnay, international correspondent
He may not be the one to sit down with Vladimir Putin, but Keith Kellogg, President Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, summed up the horror of today’s ballistic missile strikes on Sumy succinctly.
“Today’s Palm Sunday attack by Russian forces on civilian targets in Sumy crosses any line of decency. As a former military leader, I understand targeting and this is wrong.”
Vladimir Putin gave up on decency long before he started this war.
What he seems to be risking by attacks of this scale is Donald Trump’s patience.
Putin’s thinking
He does not seem to mind if strikes like this make a mockery of US attempts to bring the two warring parties to the table.
He does not seem to care if he alienates his US counterpart, who has been strangely predisposed to fawn over him to date.
Perhaps he is raising the stakes as high as he can to illustrate his strength of hand.
Strikes on civilians damage Ukrainian morale – even if they are hardly battlefield wins – and on the battlefield he is pushing ahead and does not want to stop.
Perhaps he knows that if he keeps up his military momentum, Trump will tire of a conflict he realises he cannot solve and let the matter slip whilst staying true to his MAGA-economic priorities by letting funds for Ukraine dry up.
Perhaps he thinks Trump is so keen on a rapprochement with Russia, on the big Putin-Trump bilateral, that the details, the civilian deaths along the way, will all be by the by when that long sought after photo-op finally happens.
Putin has attention
Whatever it is, Putin seems to be in no rush to get things settled.
His spokesman told a Russian state reporter today that talks were under way at several levels but that “of course, it is impossible to expect any instant results”.
Withdrawing his troops would get instant results. But that is not what Vladimir Putin wants.
His war economy is working for him, and he has the attention of the one country he considers a worthy adversary, the United States.
In the meantime, this attack reinforces why Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plea for air defence systems is his top priority – and why a ceasefire cannot come soon enough.
A bit more reaction to bring you now, this time from David Lammy.
The UK’s top diplomat said he is “horrified” by Russia’s “barbaric strike” on Sumy, and called for an “immediate ceasefire”.
The number of people killed in today’s attack in Sumy has risen to 34, according to Ukraine’s state emergency service.
That includes two children.
Another 117 people have been injured, with 15 children among them.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy shared footage of the aftermath of the attack on social media, showing dead bodies in the middle of a city street near a destroyed bus.
“Only scoundrels can act like this,” he said.
“Taking the lives of ordinary people,” he added, noting the attack had come on Palm Sunday, when people were going to church.
A peacekeeping force in Ukraine remains out of the question as it goes against Russia’s so-called “root causes” of the conflict, which Moscow began despite repeatedly denying plans to invade.
Latest analysis by the Institute for the Study of War highlights a statement given by the ambassador-at-large for Russia’s foreign ministry.
Yesterday, Rodion Miroshnik repeated the Kremlin’s objection to the presence of peacekeepers in Ukraine, insisting any contingent or European involvement would maintain the “toxicity” that led to the war in the first place.
“Miroshnik’s accusation of ‘toxicity’ in Ukraine is an indirect reference to the Kremlin’s continued demands that any conclusion to the war in Ukraine must address Russia’s so-called ‘root causes’ of the war,” the ISW said.
Russia has previously defined those “root causes” as:
“Russian officials frequently directly invoke these ‘root causes’ to justify Russia’s continued war effort and pre-war demands amounting to total Ukrainian capitulation,” the ISW added.
“And Miroshnik’s 12 April statement is an indirect restatement of this concept.”
Despite movement in the diplomatic sphere, today’s attack in Sumy served as a reminder that the battlefield situation is as dire as ever in Ukraine.
Russia has not stopped strikes even as talks to end the war continue between Washington and Moscow.
At least 32 have been reported dead in a Russian attack on Sumy today – that’s despite positive messages from both sides as recently yesterday.
Let’s catch up on those latest exchanges.
Donald Trump
Last night, the US president said he thinks “Ukraine-Russia might be going OK” and “you’re going to find out soon”.
But he did also tell reporters aboard Air Force One: “There’s a point at which you just have to either put up or shut up, and we’ll see what happens, but I think it’s going fine.”
Keith Kellogg, his envoy for the Ukraine war, commented on the attack earlier and described it as crossing “any line of decency”, but we’re yet to hear from Trump.
Steve Witkoff
Trump’s envoy has played a key role in talks with Russia so far, and on Friday he met Vladimir Putin for the third time.
Putin was shown on state TV greeting Witkoff, and state news agencies said those talks lasted more than four hours.
“The theme of the meeting – aspects of a Ukrainian settlement,” the Kremlin said after the meeting.
Sergei Lavrov
Yesterday, Russia’s foreign minister praised Trump for what he described as a better understanding of the conflict than any other Western leader.
“When we speak about eliminating root causes of any conflict, including the Ukrainian conflict, this is the only way to resolve the problem and to establish long-lasting peace,” he said.
Russia launched another attack on Ukraine just hours later, with 55 drones reported by Kyiv overnight before the strike on Sumy.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has issued a statement on the Sumy attack today, and said “cruelty struck again”.
She issued the following statement on X…
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