War between Russia and Ukraine live: Selenskyj calls for more long-range weapons after seven dead in Zaporizhia

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has renewed his call for more long-range weapons after a Russian attack killed seven people.

Ukrainian officials said 31 more people were injured in the Russian attack on the city of Vilnius near the southeastern city of Zaporizhia.

“Our cities and communities suffer from such Russian attacks every day,” Zelensky said after the attack, in which two children were killed.

However, he added that there are “ways to overcome this problem,” including “destroying Russian missile launch sites, launching attacks with truly long-range capabilities, and increasing the number of modern air defense systems.”

Four employees of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry were injured in Ukrainian shelling of the Donetsk region, the ministry said on Sunday.

“In Petrovsky district, firefighters (the employees) were extinguishing a fire that broke out after (Ukrainian) artillery shelling,” the ministry said via the messaging app Telegram. “There was a warning of a new artillery attack. The shelling hit them as they were being evacuated.”

Donetsk is one of four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine that Russia is said to have annexed in late 2022. Most countries condemned the move as illegal in the UN General Assembly. Russia does not fully control any of the four regions.

According to the state news agency TASS, Russia plans to send children to a summer camp in North Korea at the end of July.

This follows the signing of a strategic agreement between Russia and North Korea on June 19.

The children’s groups will take part in the camps in Sondovon, North Korea, accompanied by supervisors.

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

Russian soldiers in Ukraine are reportedly currently firing at targets while speeding around on motorcycles, a chaotic new tactic.

Such drive-by attacks now account for almost half of all attacks in some parts of Ukraine. The New York Times was reported citing soldiers at the front.

This appears to be a new strategy Russia is using when crossing heavily mined fields that could be detonated by tanks. While armored vehicles are easy targets for drones monitoring them from the air, fast-moving motorcycles are harder to hit.

Once Russian soldiers have crossed minefields on their motorcycles, they could abandon the motorcycles and move into trenches to fight the Ukrainians on foot, the report said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky again appealed to his allies for long-range weapons after a Russian attack near the southeastern city of Zaporizhia killed seven people and injured more than 30.

About a dozen people died on Saturday as a result of Russian attacks in Ukraine, according to Reuters.

Such deaths could be prevented, said Zelensky, if Russian missile launchers could be destroyed with real long-range missiles and the number of modern air defense systems could be increased.

“Our cities and communities suffer from such Russian attacks every day,” the Ukrainian president posted on Telegram.

Hackers have reportedly destroyed hundreds of terabytes of data belonging to companies supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said hackers had destroyed over 100 terabytes of data belonging to OrbitSoft, a software company that works with the Russian army.

The ministry said data on eight servers belonging to another company that supplies navigation equipment for Russian drones had also been destroyed.

According to the Kyiv Independent, the hackers also attacked over a dozen Internet service provider servers and deleted all data.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said ten people, all civilians, had been returned to Ukraine in a prisoner exchange after spending several years in captivity in Russia and its ally Belarus.

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

He thanked a team, including the Vatican, that is working to secure the release of the prisoners.

Ukrainian officials said the return of the civilians was part of a prisoner of war exchange carried out earlier this week in which each side returned 90 detainees.

There was no comment from Russia and there was no talk from Ukraine about releasing Russian prisoners.

Among those returned was Nariman Dzhelyal, deputy chairman of the Assembly of the Crimean Tatar ethnic community, who was arrested by Russian occupation forces in 2021, seven years after Moscow’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula.

Also released were two Eastern Rite Catholic priests who had been captured by Russian forces in the occupied port of Berdyansk on the Sea of ​​Azov.

Five of those released were held in former Soviet Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally, which allowed the Kremlin to use its territory to invade Ukraine in 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for the production of medium-range missiles to be resumed in Russia. These were banned due to a contract with the USA that has since been terminated.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned ground-based missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers, was considered a milestone in arms control when then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed it in the 1980s.

The US withdrew from the treaty in 2019, citing Russian violations.

“We must start producing these attack systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where to deploy them if necessary to ensure our security,” Putin said at a meeting of the Russian National Security Council.