Nine people have been killed in a Russian drone attack on a minibus Ukraine says was evacuating civilians, prompting Volodymyr Zelenskyy to call for tougher sanctions against Moscow.
Local authorities said that most of those killed were elderly women being evacuated from Bilopillya, a town in the Sumy region that has come under repeated Russian attack.
The strike on the bus on Saturday morning, with at least one Lancet drone, also injured four other passengers and came just hours after the first direct peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow since 2022 broke up inconclusively after two hours.
The attack came as a stark reminder of the huge problems confronting the ongoing ceasefire talks as Russian officials on Saturday listed yet more conditions before any new talks could take place – including raising an apparent objection to whether it would accept the Ukrainian president as a signatory on any future deal.
“All the deceased were civilians,” wrote Zelenskyy on X. “And the Russians could not have failed to understand what kind of vehicle they were targeting. This was a deliberate killing of civilians.”
“Pressure must be exerted on Russia to stop the killings,” he added. “Without tougher sanctions, without stronger pressure, Russia will not seek real diplomacy.”
The Sumy attack occurred amid claims that Russian negotiators in Turkey had demanded that Ukrainian forces withdraw from five regions of the country as a precondition to ending the fighting, including from territory not occupied by Russian forces.
Images from the attack showed the bus on a country road with its roof ripped off by the blast. The bus was travelling towards Sumy at about 6am when it was “targeted by the Russians”, the military administration added.
“This bus was carrying people out of the city for evacuation,” the head of the town’s administration, Yurii Zarko, told the Suspilne news site, as he declared three days of mourning in Bilopillya.
“Wounded were treated at the scene and then moved to a hospital in Sumy. We are currently retrieving the bodies. Some victims have not yet been identified. Most of them are elderly women, along with two or three men.”
Residents in Bilopillya – about 6 miles (10km) from the frontline – and the nearby town of Vorozhba were urged to relocate on 5 May because of continued Russian shelling, and daily bus evacuations have been continuing since then.
Russia’s Tass state news agency, citing a statement from the defence ministry, reported that Russian forces had struck a Ukrainian military equipment staging area in the Sumy region with drones.
The blast came hours after Russia and Ukraine concluded their first direct talks in almost three years in Istanbul without a significant breakthrough. The two sides agreed to a large-scale prisoner exchange but no ceasefire, saying instead they would commit to trade ideas on a possible truce.
After the talks, Kyiv said it was seeking an “unconditional ceasefire” to pause the conflict, which has destroyed large swathes of Ukraine and displaced millions of people.
But Moscow has consistently rebuffed those calls and the only concrete agreement appeared to be the deal to exchange 1,000 prisoners each.
According to accounts of the Istanbul meeting, the Russian delegation demanded the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, only after which could there be a ceasefire.
Asked about the claims, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to comment. Russia’s top negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said Moscow and Kyiv would “present their vision of a possible future ceasefire”, without saying when.
The Kremlin said that first the PoW swap must be completed and both sides needed to present their visions for a ceasefire before fixing the next round of talks. “For now, we need to do what the delegations agreed on yesterday” in Turkey, Peskov said, adding that “this, of course, means first and foremost to complete a 1,000 for 1,000 swap”.
Peskov added that Russia also had issues over the “identity of the person authorised to sign [any agreement] on behalf of Ukraine”.
Vladimir Putin’s evasions around the ceasefire talks in Istanbul, which he called for but failed to attend, and Russian manoeuvring around the contacts have led to accusations that Russia is insincere about seeking an end to the war.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, who is in Tirana on Saturday for a meeting of European leaders, including the UK’s Keir Starmer, accused Putin of “cynicism”.
