LATEST HEADLINES

• Russian missiles killed at least six people in Ukraine's Black Sea port of Odesa and eastern Donetsk region overnight, Ukraine's military and local officials said. 

• Earlier in the evening, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had called for tougher sanctions to halt the flow of components used in Russian missiles, saying it was cheaper to stop their transfer than to improve anti-aircraft systems against their deployment.

• Ukraine forces shelled a residential area in the city of Nova Kakhovka, injuring one person, the city's Russia-installed administration said. Last week the Kakhovka dam in the city was destroyed, flooding swaths of land and forcing thousands to flee the area.

• President Vladimir Putin has said that any further mobilization of Russia's troops would depend on what Moscow wanted to achieve in the Ukraine conflict, adding that he faced a question only he could answer – should Russia try to take Kyiv again?  READ MORE BELOW

• President Zelenskyy has hailed the 'forward movement' and advances made by Ukraine's troops near the long-besieged city of Bakhmut in the east and on the war's southern front. "Thank you soldiers! Thank you for every step and every meter freed from Russian evil," he said.

• NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Ukraine was making progress in its counteroffensive and predicted NATO leaders would increase military assistance to Kyiv when they meet next month.

• Following a meeting between Stoltenberg and U.S. President Joe Biden, the Pentagon announced a new $325 million U.S. military aid package for Ukraine that will include munitions for air defense systems, ammunition and vehicles.

• A top Russian officer has been killed in a Ukrainian missile strike during Kyiv's counteroffensive, local officials announced. Major-General Sergei Goryachev, Chief of Staff of Russia's 35th Army, died on the Zaporizhzhia front where Ukrainian forces have been retaking territory.

• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said his country had started taking delivery of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, some of which he said were three times more powerful than the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan.

• The UN's nuclear chief has delayed a planned trip to Ukraine's Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant until it is safer to travel, according to a senior Ukrainian government official.

• Russia's Dmitri Medvedev, a close ally of Putin, said Moscow now had free rein to destroy its enemies' undersea communications cables given what he said was Western complicity in the Nord Stream pipeline blasts, one of Russia's most important energy corridors.

• France said a Russia-linked misinformation campaign had faked its foreign ministry website, targeted other government websites and taken over several French media sites as part of broader efforts to smear Ukraine and its Western allies. Switzerland also reported a pro-Russian hacking group had intensified its attacks, with hackers claiming to have taken down several major websites including the one for Geneva Airport.

IN DETAIL

Putin muses whether Russia should try to take Kyiv again

President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that any further Russian mobilization would depend on what the Kremlin wanted to achieve in the Ukraine conflict, adding that he faced a question only he could answer – should Russia try to take Kyiv again?

More than 15 months since the conflict began, Russian and Ukrainian forces are still battling with artillery, tanks and drones along a 1,000-kilometer front line, far away from the capital Kyiv.

Putin used the question and answer session with a group of Russian journalists to offer a series of warnings to the West, suggesting Russia may have to impose a "sanitary zone" in Ukraine to prevent it attacking Russia and saying Moscow was considering pulling out of the Black Sea grain deal.

He added that Russia currently had no need for nationwide martial law and would keep responding to breaches of its red lines. 

But one of his most opaque remarks was about Kyiv, which Russian forces tried and failed to capture just hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine on February 24 last year.

"Should we return there or not? Why am I asking such a rhetorical question?" Putin told the 18 Russian war correspondents and bloggers in the Kremlin. "Only I can answer this myself." 

His comments on Kyiv – during several hours of answering questions – were shown on Russian state television. Putin last September announced what he said was a "partial mobilization" of 300,000 reservists. Asked about another call-up, he said: "There is no such need today." 

However, he said it depended on what Moscow wanted to achieve and pointing out that some public figures thought Russia needed 1 million or even 2 million additional men in uniform. "It depends on what we want," Putin said.

Russia now controls about 18 percent of Ukraine's territory, but Putin said the conflict had shown Moscow had a lack of high-precision munitions and complex communications equipment.

He added that Russia had established control over "almost all" of what he casts as "Novorossiya" (New Russia), a Tsarist-era imperial term for a swath of southern Ukraine, stressing that Russia was not going to change course in Ukraine.

Russia's future plans in Ukraine, he said, would be decided once the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which he said began on June 4, was over.

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