Russian bombs kill two, injure nine in Sumy, including three children

Russian forces struck the centre of Sumy with four guided aerial bombs on Monday, killing two people and injuring nine, three of them children, Ukraine's State Emergency Service (DSNS) said. The bombs hit a school building, a residential building and a cemetery, and rescuers fought fires at three separate addresses in the city, DSNS said. The toll is higher than an earlier figure of six injured given by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who said all the casualties came from the strike on the city's private housing sector rather than from the hit on the school.

Classes were under way at the school when it was struck, but pupils and teachers had already moved into a shelter and none of them was hurt, Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi said, confirming the school itself produced no casualties. Zelensky said about 100 people, including children and staff, were evacuated from the school in time, and he thanked its teachers and administration for how they responded.

Ukraine's state emergency service separately reported damage to two residential areas of Sumy from the same wave of strikes, and Ukrinform reported that KAB strikes, drone attacks and mortar fire injured four people across the wider Sumy region on the same day. It was not clear whether that regional figure referred to the same casualties described in the city or to separate incidents elsewhere in the region, and the tallies should not be added together.

Koretskyi said Russian strikes were continuing "almost without interruption" across much of the country, with attacks overnight and during the day hitting eleven regions: Kyiv, Odesa, Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk, Zhytomyr, Volyn, Rivne, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Sumy. He said Russia continued to target residential buildings, civilian businesses, and transport and energy infrastructure across the country.

Zelensky said Ukraine expects that any response to the attacks by its partners will not be limited to statements. He said Russia would not stop the attacks without real pressure from the United States and Europe, and urged Ukraine's partners to keep that pressure in mind as the war continued.