At least one of the Iskander M ballistic missiles used to attack Sumy on Sunday “had a warhead fitted with projectiles, causing the thousands of holes in the walls we can see in photographs of the scene,” says Ivan Stupak, a military analyst and former Ukrainian secret service employee.

“Each roughly 1.5-millimetre steel ball bearing shoots out at a speed of up to 2,000 metres per second. Weapons like these are indiscriminate and should not be used in populated areas where there may be civilians. The Russians committed another war crime by launching these missiles at the city, and on a holiday, Palm Sunday, too,” Stupak said.

Commenting on the Sumy attack on Monday, Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed it had struck “a meeting of the Siversk operational-tactical group’s command staff”, claiming to have killed over 60 Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) soldiers and accusing Kyiv of “using the Ukrainian population as a human shield, placing military objects and conducting military events in the centre of a densely populated city.”

“Even if we assume that Sumy had been holding a gathering of servicemen at the time, using ballistic missiles filled with projectiles in a densely populated area is in breach of the rules of war and the Geneva Convention,” military expert and reserve AFU colonel Roman Svitan told Novaya Europe.

“Sumy is a frontline city where there are lots of servicemen. … But there are definitely going to be civilians out on the street at the weekend. Whoever gave the order knew there would be civilian casualties,” Svitan said.

Svitan told Novaya Europe that the warheads on an Iskander M ballistic missile contain tens of thousands of projectiles weighing about 200kg in total. Russia has increasingly been targeting Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles recently as Ukrainian air defences had got better at shooting down cruise missiles. Patriot air defence systems are required to take down ballistic missiles and Ukraine is woefully short of them.

However, using a ballistic missile to strike a building with targets inside is illogical, according to Stupak. Normally, he said, the aggressor would use a missile with a high-explosive warhead and destroy an entire building, but in Sumy they used a missile filled with projectiles, which would normally be used to take out soldiers in an open setting. The same type of missile was recently used in the city of Kryvyi Rih, where 20 people, including nine children, were killed.

The Russian military intelligence may have relied on long-range reconnaissance drones to establish that there were a number of servicemen assembled in the centre of Sumy, or from agents listening in to communication networks, Svitan says. But even if there was credible intelligence that servicemen had gathered in the city, there was no reason to use two ballistic missiles packed with projectiles to strike it, he continued.

“The mass killing of civilians in rocket attacks amounts to sheer terror tactics,” Stupak agrees. “The aim is to break the Ukrainian people’s will and persuade Volodymyr Zelensky to conclude a peace agreement on Russian terms as soon as possible. The Russians have no qualms about using such weapons even though there are currently talks between the leaders of the US, Russia and Ukraine,” he told Novaya Europe.

Svitan said he believed that Russia was attempting “openly and cynically” to put pressure on Kyiv to surrender. “Steve Witkoff was embracing Putin … and now a missile rips to shreds over 30 people and injures over 100. They’d already hit Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro, Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities too,” he concluded.