Sumy strike, Sumy silence: the Russian tactic of choosing civilians over headlines

On the morning of 13 April 2025, two Russian ballistic missiles slammed into the centre of Sumy in north-eastern Ukraine during Palm Sunday services. Within hours the footage was everywhere: a glide bomb crater on a TV crew's live broadcast, a body bag carried down a residential stairwell, the local cathedral's golden dome framed against a column of black smoke. By the following Tuesday, international attention had largely moved on.

That gap, between the kinetic event and the news cycle that metabolises it, is the story. Russia has spent four years refining a targeting doctrine that the world cannot seem to stay focused on. The Sumy strike killed civilians on a public holiday in broad daylight and was discussed in foreign ministries for roughly seventy-two hours. The same week, a successful drone hit on a Russian 39N6 Kasta 2E2 surveillance radar north of occupied Kerch, documented by the OSINTtechnical channel, drew a fraction of the column inches. The asymmetry is not accidental. It is the operation.

The hits that did not age well

Sumy was not the only Palm Sunday atrocity of the war, but it was the most exposed. Open-source analysts circulated geolocated footage within an hour. The strike pattern, two Iskander-M ballistic missiles arriving in quick succession over a residential district, matched a documented Russian practice of double-tap targeting: one munition to inflict casualties, a second timed for first responders. The Kremlin's spokespeople declined to confirm or deny. Telegram channels associated with Russian military bloggers carried oblique references to a "successful strike on a concentration of enemy personnel" without specifying the target. Civilians returning from church made up most of the dead.

Western coverage ran dense for the first news cycle, then thinned. By the second Tuesday, the strike had been folded into the larger ledger of Russian missile attacks, statistically rather than morally. The pattern is familiar enough to be worth naming: a mass-casualty event, a wire flurry, a cluster of human-interest obituaries, a brief debate over weapon selection, then a return to the operational tempo of the front. Sumy aged the way Bucha did not, because Bucha was discovered after the troops had left and the photographic record was already frozen. Sumy was discovered in real time, and real-time atrocity competes with real-time everything else.

The target the cameras could not leave

The same week, a Ukrainian attack drone scored what may be the war's most consequential single hit on Russian air-defence infrastructure: a 39N6 Kasta 2E2 surveillance radar covering the Sea of Azov north of occupied Kerch. Onboard footage released through the OSINTtechnical channel showed the drone's terminal approach, the radar's distinctive lattice rising against the Kerch Strait, and the impact. The Kasta 2E2 is not a glamorous target. It is, however, the kind of system whose loss measurably degrades Russia's ability to detect low-altitude aircraft and cruise missiles over a wide arc of southern Ukraine and the Black Sea littoral.

The footage circulated widely inside the open-source intelligence community and within specialist defence outlets. It did not circulate on morning television. There was no scramble of cameras, no human-interest angle, no ready-made villain. A radar mast is not a person. A radar mast does not produce a photograph that a viewer will carry into the rest of the day. The two events, taken together, illustrate the targeting problem from both ends: Russia chooses targets that the international press cannot look away from, Ukraine increasingly chooses targets that the international press cannot easily picture.

When the war goes quiet

Sumy is also a test of how the Russian information environment metabolises its own operations. Russian-aligned Telegram channels treated the strike as a routine success. Milbloggers on the Two Majors channel and similar outlets referenced the hit without dwelling on the casualty count. The dominant frame on Russian state-adjacent media was the official one: the special military operation proceeds, Ukrainian infrastructure serving military purposes is being degraded, civilian casualties are not discussed because they do not exist in this framing. The frame worked as intended. Within forty-eight hours, Sumy was no longer a story in Russian-language media. It had become a statistic.

Ukrainian coverage, by contrast, stayed with the event. Kyiv Post and Ukrainska Pravda ran sustained reporting on the victims, the cathedral damage, and the missile type. Local Sumy Oblast authorities published names. The asymmetry of attention, Ukrainian grief concentrated and persistent, Russian acknowledgement absent, is itself part of the war's information terrain. Russia does not need to deny Sumy. It needs only to forget it.

What the targeting math looks like

Russian targeting doctrine has been extensively documented by Western and Ukrainian open-source analysts over four years. The pattern is consistent enough to describe plainly: missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian population centres are timed for periods of maximum civilian presence, religious holidays, market days, school return. The selection of weapon matters less than the selection of moment. A glide bomb hitting a residential block at 7 a.m. produces footage. The same bomb hitting an empty block at 3 a.m. produces rubble. Russia has, throughout the war, preferred the first calculation.

This is not a new insight. It is, however, an insight that the international news cycle has been unable to convert into sustained pressure. Western governments issued statements after Sumy. Several expelled Russian diplomats. None of the diplomatic responses produced a measurable change in Russian targeting behaviour over the subsequent weeks. The structural problem is that an atrocity, to function as a deterrent, has to remain costly to the perpetrator after the cameras leave. Sumy stopped being costly roughly when the second news cycle ended.

The silhouette of the next strike

The pattern will repeat. Russian ballistic missile production has, by every available Western estimate, increased over the course of the war. Iranian-designed Shahed-type drones and their Russian Geran variants are produced in quantities that allow nightly strikes across multiple Ukrainian oblasts. The Kholodnogorsky district of Kharkov was hit by a Geran-5 in the same news cycle as Sumy, footage of which circulated on open channels; the strike damaged a warehouse and wounded civilians. None of these events will be the last of their kind.

What is worth watching is not whether the strikes continue, they will, but whether the targeting logic shifts in response to battlefield pressure. Ukraine's successful hits on Russian air-defence infrastructure, including the Kerch radar, indicate a growing capacity to attrit the systems that make sustained Russian air operations possible. If the air-defence envelope around occupied Crimea continues to degrade, the calculus of which targets Russia can hit, and how reliably, will tighten. The civilian calculus will not. Sumy is the template, and the template travels.

The next Palm Sunday is six months away. The missiles do not need to wait.