Surviving 'bus of death'. Report from Sumy

"I was afraid to go in there and see the bodies"

The historical center of Sumy was always crowded. Two wide streets, a park area, eye-catching architecture, which has the status of monuments. Here are the buildings of Sumy State University, the courthouse, the Institute of Applied Physics, the theater, the philharmonic…

On April 13, two Russian Iskander-M missiles practically left no one alive here.

"This is the city center. There were a lot of people walking here. It was a day off. I remember it so well when we arrived at the impact site yesterday... And people are walking past all this, with a consecrated willow. And they are just crying..." says Liudmyla Mykhailenko, a psychologist at the Proliska humanitarian mission.

The first strike happened at 10:15 AM at the Congress Center building, a university building where many city events were held: from conferences, meetings and trainings to various events for children. The shelter there was considered to be perhaps the best equipped in the city. A performance for children was also planned there that day at 11:00 AM.

"I was really afraid to go in there and see the bodies," admits an employee of the facility on condition of anonymity.

Now he doesn't know if the building can be restored at all, and a huge hole has been punched through the shelter.

"There really was supposed to be a performance for children there, because the Sumy Theater for Children and Youth does not have its own shelter. All the decorations were ready, the screensavers were flashing on the laptop... It's a wonder that no one was there at that moment. Miraculously, the security guard also survived," the man adds.

However, he hesitates to comment, even anonymously, on whether a military award ceremony was held there prior to the event, with reports circulating on social media.

"Mom was covered in blood"

In addition to the swarm of rescuers and utility workers with large equipment, workers from nearby damaged buildings are running around with buckets and sacks.

“It survived two wars, but I didn’t survive the Moskali,” the man says about the Institute of Applied Physics building, carrying a bucket of construction debris over the fence.

“And this is a historical building… the former Kondratiev estate,” blabbers a man gray with dust with a bucket, who introduces himself as research fellow Yevhen Osadchyi.

“Take cover! Everyone was told to take cover! The Shahed [drones] are flying!” another employee shouts nearby.

Most people do run. Although some people wave their hands, saying, "Oh, stop it."

An aerial threat interrupted the work of clearing the rubble five more times. Three of them were accompanied by explosions somewhere in the vicinity.

Residents are bustling in the courtyard of a nearby apartment building. They are running to clear the rubble from their apartments, then going down to the basement shelter, where traces of blood are still visible on the floor. Yesterday, two wounded elderly women were hiding there among others after the strike.

"We were at home. We were going to go to church. After the first explosion, our home shook. I ran to the neighboring entry section to my mother. And on the street, I was stunned by a second, more terrible explosion. When I ran to my mother, she was covered in blood. She is 87," says Natalia Pihul.

Her mother's apartment was more damaged. Everything was covered in glass, turned upside down, windows were broken. Natalia's colleagues were called in to help.

"Not my initiative"

The people of Sumy are carrying flowers to the city center. Some come up and can't help but cry. Diana was restrained, but then she started to tremble.

"Yesterday, even on the videos that everyone was showing, you could hear me screaming. After I saw them lying there, face down..." the girl says about her two coworkers from a cafe located 50 meters from the epicenter of the impact.

The women went into the store. They died on the spot, never making it back. Yulia Yelshanska, a confectioner, was 30. Cook Olena Obravit was 40.

"Yulia was a very beautiful girl, warm-hearted, sweet. Lena was always cheerful, never afraid of anything... We still don't believe it," says Diana.

The second missile, which caused the greatest number of casualties, was fired by the Russians at the academic building of Sumy University. The building is in ruins. The university's rector estimates the damage at hundreds of millions of hryvnias. But the hardest thing, he says, is to come to terms with the deaths of students.

“Two medical students died here. I saw their bodies next to the building… This is a great tragedy… My condolences to the parents,” says rector Vasyl Karpusha.

As a result of the Russian missile attack on Sumy, 14 police officers were also injured, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said at the scene of the tragedy. When asked why the regional governor, Volodymyr Artyukh, was not here and whether law enforcement officers had any questions for him, the minister replied as follows:

"I can say one thing: the SBU is investigating this attack - it will issue its conclusions. The head of the regional military administration has his own hierarchy, which will then make this or that decision. But today, when we arrived in Sumy, we met with the regional governor, discussed the functioning and elimination of the consequences of this terrible attack."

We tried to get a comment from the Sumy regional chief about whether an event to award the soldiers of the 117th brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces was really planned, but we did not receive a response. Later, he did confirm this information to journalists of Suspilne. Sumy, but stated "that it was not his initiative."

"It's not for nothing that they called it the 'bus of death'"

13-year-old Kyrylo, who the day before had been rescuing people from a burned and shattered bus, is now in the hospital with his mother, Maryna. The woman said that on April 13, she and her son were riding bus No. 62 when the missile attack occurred. The bus was packed with people, some of whom had to ride standing up.

"We smelled burning. It was very dark, there was only dust, it was impossible to open your eyes. Then it started to dawn a little. We started to act after we realized that everything was fine with him (with his son Kyrylo - ed.) and everything was fine with me, even though everything was covered in blood. There was adrenaline," Maryna says in a comment to hromadske.

The blast wave from the arrival shattered the glass in the bus. The main impact fell on the front of the bus, where many bodies were later found. Meanwhile, the back door was blocked with wood and the passengers could not open it. Then Kyrylo managed to jump out into the hole created by the broken glass and managed to open the locked door from the street.

"He just, I don't know how, figured out what to do and jumped into this hole... You know, how pike dive - he grouped himself like that and jumped. I was very scared when he jumped out the window hoping that nothing else would happen to him," shares Maryna.

"It was not for nothing that it was called the 'bus of death'. Most of the people there died. But many people were able to get out and survive. Even classmates wrote to Kyrylo: 'My grandmother, my aunt were on this bus.' They thanked him for the fact that they were able to get out through this door," the woman said.

Now Kyrylo is feeling better: the ringing in his ears has stopped, and doctors have removed a metal fragment from his head. Two other small fragments in his skull will most likely remain with him for the rest of his life. The boy's mother was also injured - her entire face was cut by fragments.

After everything, Maryna's youngest son, who was at home during the attack, began to say that he was the "brother of a hero."