Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleaded with President Donald Trump to visit his country to “understand what Putin did” after two Russian ballistic missiles tore into a city, killing 34 people and injuring 119 others Sunday.
"Please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead,” Zelenskyy said, referring to Trump, in a CBS News interview broadcast Sunday.
He also referred to his catastrophic White House meeting with Trump and Vice President JD Vance in February that unraveled into a live-on-air clash, with Vance leading some of the strongest attacks on Zelenskyy during the extraordinary exchange.
“It seems to me that the vice president is somehow justifying Putin’s actions,” he said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I tried to explain, ‘You can’t look for something in the middle. There is an aggressor and there is a victim. The Russians are the aggressor, and we are the victim.’”
Trump previously blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion and said the country “should have never started it” while falsely accusing Zelenskyy of being a “dictator.”
“Russian narratives are prevailing in the U.S.,” and that led to “a shift in tone, a shift in reality,” Zelenskyy said.
On Sunday, two Russian missiles struck Sumy, a city close to the Russian border, as many residents were attending church on Palm Sunday. It was the deadliest Russian strike so far this year.
Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said the Russian missiles contained cluster munitions — tiny explosive bomblets launched from a rocket or missile that are scattered over a wide area and make the bombs deadlier.
Trump called the attack “terrible,” and said that Russian forces had “made a mistake” without elaborating what that mistake was.
Asked about the use of ballistic missiles, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a regular news briefing, “I can only repeat and remind you of the repeated statements of both our president and our military representatives that our military strikes exclusively military and near-military targets.”
The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that more than 60 Ukrainian troops had been killed by “two Iskander-M tactical missiles.” The Iskander-M is a surface-to-surface short-range ballistic missile, according to the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the development and deployment of missile defense for the U.S. and its allies.
The strikes coincided with ongoing diplomatic efforts by the U.S. to broker a ceasefire between Moscow and Kyiv. On Friday, Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Putin met in St. Petersburg.
Neither Moscow nor Witkoff commented on what was said at the meeting, which did not include representatives from Ukraine.
Inside Russia, prominent pro-Kremlin commentators called on the government to issue condolences on the deaths of civilians in Sumy, some of whom were killed in a spot where people had gathered for an award ceremony for the Ukrainian military.
“It would be right for Russia to officially express its condolences now in light of the large number of civilian casualties in Sumy and at the same time to call on Zelensky and the Armed Forces of Ukraine to stop gathering children, and civilians in general, for military events.,” Russian expert Sergei Markov said in a post on Telegram.
The attack on Sumy sparked widespread condemnation elsewhere, including from some Trump officials and foreign leaders.
The U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said Sunday the attack had crossed “any line of decency” while Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. “extends our deepest condolences to the victims of today’s horrifying Russian missile attack,” while adding that it was a “tragic reminder” of Trump’s time and effort to end the war.
In Germany, the chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, while speaking to German broadcaster ARD on Sunday called the attack “a perfidious act … and it is a serious war crime, deliberate and intended,” while British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “appalled at Russia’s horrific attacks."
