Last weekend, Alla Shyrshonkova got on the 62 bus on a journey to her cottage near the Ukrainian city of Sumy. It was a warm spring day. “I thought I’d sit with friends, have some tea. Birds were singing. The weather was beautiful. It was so nice,” she recalled.
“The bus was packed. There wasn’t a single free seat. People were standing. Some were going to church for Palm Sunday. There were families with children.”
As she reached the city centre she heard a loud bang. Two minutes later – as the bus made its way down Petropavlivska street – there was a second massive explosion. “The blast was in front of me, so I didn’t see it. I only heard it. I was sitting behind the driver, with my back to him. When I heard the noise, I covered my head with my hands and ducked.”
After that, she said, “rocks, glass and everything went flying”. Shyrshonkova lifted her head. Blood was gushing “like a fountain” from her arm. “I saw cars on fire and smoke. People were lying at my feet. I said to them: ‘Get up, get up.’ They were silent.”
A conductor called the name of the driver – “Kolya” – but there was no reply. Passengers tried to climb out of a window. Eventually, a teenage boy opened a door and she staggered out.
The double strike on Sumy was the bloodiest single moment this year in Russia’s murderous war against Ukraine. The Iskander ballistic missiles carried deadly cluster of munitions which released a wave of shrapnel. Thirty-five people were killed.
Two of the victims buried last week were children, aged eleven and seven. Sumy residents left toys at the spot where they perished: a bear, a hippo, a toy car and a football.
Shyrshonkova was one of 129 people wounded. Among them are 15 children. Some are critically injured, hovering “between life and death”, as Tetyana, a nurse at Sumy’s general hospital, told the Observer. The first missile crashed into a university congress centre, plunging through a glass atrium and a basement theatre. The second turned the city into a vision of hell, with bodies on the ground and a little girl crying and covered in blood.
The war seems further away than ever from a peaceful resolution. On Friday, Donald Trump signalled he is ready to “take a pass” on brokering an agreement unless the two sides reach a deal “very shortly”.
More than a month ago, Ukraine accepted a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire. Russia didn’t. Since then, it has demonstratively escalated its bombing campaign on civilians and infrastructure, hitting Sumy, Kharkiv and Dnipro.
As many predicted, Trump’s negotiating strategy has been to favour Russia. He has effectively ended military assistance to Kyiv, while falsely blaming Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Joe Biden for “starting” the war.
No similar pressure has been applied to Moscow. Trump downplayed last weekend’s Sumy strike, calling it a “mistake”. His special envoy, Steve Witkoff – who met European leaders on Thursday – parrots Kremlin disinformation.
Speaking from hospital, survivors expressed anger at the US president, accusing him of laziness and a bewildering partisanship. “What happened in Sumy is terror, obviously – nothing else,” Shyrshonkova said. “Trump is basically supporting Russia now.
“I wish he would come to Ukraine and see what his beloved puylo [a slang term for Putin, meaning prick] is doing. I want Trump to help us at the same level as Joe Biden.”
Another wounded survivor, 72-year-old Hennadii Smoliarov, said the Russians were carrying out genocide. “They are trying to destroy all Ukrainians. They hate us. Putin says we are not a people.
“They promote the concept of Russkiy Mir or ‘Russian World’. That means conquering everywhere.”
Smoliarov said that, when he was studying in Moscow in the 1980s, he was called a Khokhol, a derogatory term for Ukrainians. “Prejudice is widespread,” he noted.
He had been sitting on the 62 bus, having gone into town to fetch eyedrops for his wife, Anna. After the first strike the bus stopped outside Sumy state university’s institute of applied physics. Shrapnel from the second missile hit his lung and head. “There was a strong shockwave. You couldn’t see inside. The smoke was like a fog, it was so thick.”
A woman lay motionless at his feet. “I lost strength and collapsed right inside the bus,” he recalled.
A volunteer grabbed Smoliarov by the collar of his brown leather jacket and dragged him on to the pavement.
The explosion blew the wooden doors and glass from the 19th-century institute, sending shards into its garden and flowerbeds. A quartz wall clock on the ground floor stopped at the moment of impact: 10.20am and 40 seconds. Across the road, a giant hole was gouged in the white-painted economics and business faculty building.
Another wounded survivor, Viktor Voitenko, said Sumy was in its fourth year of war. “We’ve had so many attacks, with Shahed drones and missiles,” he said. “The air raids don’t stop.”
The city, a key military hub, is located less than 20 miles from Russia. From here, Ukraine’s armed forces launched a surprise mini-invasion last August into Russia’s neighbouring Kursk region. They withdrew in March. Fighting continues in villages along the border, where Ukrainian troops hold a sliver of Russian territory.
Voitenko works at the physics institute as a security guard. He was in the foyer when the second Iskander dropped. A metal fragment hit him in the spine. “I couldn’t feel my legs. I called my wife and she reached me in five minutes. After that, the police took me to a safe place,” he said.
Lying in a hospital bed, Voitenko said it was unclear if he would walk again: “It’s in God’s hands. My operation went well. The doctors say they can’t guarantee anything.”
Aged 56, Voitenko previously worked as a builder and as a “liquidator” – a member of the clean-up crew sent to the Chornobyl nuclear power station after the 1986 disaster.
The Kremlin, he said, was addicted to reckless imperialism. “Before the war, we lived well. We had everything. I have a beautiful wife, an 11-year-old daughter and two cars.”
The bus driver, Mykola Leon – killed on Palm Sunday, together with most of his passengers – was a distant relative, he said.
Shyrshonkova spoke to the Observer from the neighbouring hospital room. She put her survival down to a class she attended in the 1950s as a schoolgirl in the Soviet Union.
“We had civil defence lessons. The teachers told us capitalism was bad. They also explained what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. We were taught to keep our mouth closed and to cover our head and eyes.
“When I heard the explosion on Sunday it came back to me. Some instinct took over,” she said.
Once she left hospital, Shyrshonkova said she hoped to visit her dacha. “I’ve planted tomatoes and peppers on the balcony. I want to see them growing.”
Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber
