Russia-Ukraine – live: Zelensky calls for long-range weapons after 7 killed in strike

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has renewed his call for more long-range weapons after seven people were killed in a Russian strike.

The Russian attack on the town of Vilniansk, near the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, also injured 31 others, Ukrainian officials said.

“Our cities and communities suffer daily from such Russian strikes,” Mr Zelensky said after the attack which left two children dead.

But he added that there were “ways to overcome this”, including “destroying Russian missile launchers, striking with real long-range capability and increasing the number of modern air defence systems”.

Four employees of Russia’s ministry of emergency situations were injured in Ukraine’s shelling of the Donetsk region, the ministry said on Sunday.

“In the Petrovsky district, department firefighters (the employees) were extinguishing a fire that occurred after (Ukrainian) shelling,” the ministry said on the Telegram messaging app. “There was an alert for a new artillery strike. The shelling hit them as they were evacuating.”

Donetsk is one of four regions in Ukraine’s east and south that Russia claimed to have annexed in late 2022 in a move condemned as illegal by most countries at the UN General Assembly. Russia does not fully control any of the four regions.

Russia is planning to send children to a summer camp in North Korea in late July, according to state news agency TASS.

This follows the signing of a strategic deal by Russia and North Korea on 19 June.

Groups of children accompanied by counsellors will attend the camps in North Korea’s Sondovon.

“We are now planning joint camp shifts… We are planning children’s exchanges,” Grigory Gurov, head of the Russian youth group Movement of the First, said, according to The Kyiv Independent.

Russian soldiers are now reportedly shooting targets in Ukraine while speeding across on motorbikes in a chaotic new tactic.

Such drive-by attacks now account for nearly half of all attacks in some parts of Ukraine, The New York Times reported, citing soldiers on the front line.

This appears to be a new strategy Russia employs for crossing heavily mined fields that could be triggered to explode by armoured tanks. While armoured vehicles are easy targets for drones monitoring from above, fast-moving motorcycles are harder to hit.

Once the Russian soldiers cross minefields on their bikes, they may leave the motorcycles behind and enter trenches to fight Ukrainians on foot, the report said.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky made a renewed plea to his allies for long-range weapons as a Russian attack near the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia killed seven and injured over 30.

About a dozen people died from Russian strikes in Ukraine on Saturday, according to Reuters.

Mr Zelensky said such deaths could be prevented if Russian missile launchers could be destroyed using real long-range missiles, and by increasing the number of modern air defence systems.

“Our cities and communities suffer daily from such Russian strikes,” the Ukrainian president posted on Telegram.

Hackers reportedly destroyed hundreds of terabytes of data of companies supporting Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian defence ministry said hackers destroyed over 100 terabytes of data from OrbitSoft, a software company working with the Russian army.

The data in eight servers of another company providing navigation equipment for Russian drones were also destroyed, the ministry said.

The hackers also targeted over a dozen servers of internet service providers, erasing all data, according to the Kyiv Independent.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that 10 people, all civilians, were handed back to Ukraine as part of an exchange of detainees after several years of captivity in Russia and its ally Belarus.

“We managed to bring back 10 more of our people from Russian captivity, despite all the difficulties,” Zelensky wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

He thanked a team dedicated to securing the release of the captives, including the Vatican.

Ukrainian officials said the return of the civilians was part of an exchange of prisoners of war conducted earlier this week under which each side handed back 90 detainees.

Russia did not comment and Ukraine made no mention of any release of Russians in captivity.

Among those brought back was Nariman Dzhelyal, deputy head of the assembly of the ethnic Crimean Tatar community, seized by Russian occupation forces in 2021, seven years after Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula.

Also freed were two eastern rite Catholic priests captured by Russian forces in the occupied port of Berdiansk on the Sea of Azov.

Five of those liberated had been held in ex-Soviet Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally, which allowed the Kremlin to use its territory to help launch the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.