President says all perpetrators behind murder of Ukrainian POWs in Olenivka will be found

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said this in his nightly video address, Ukrinform reports.

"All evidence of this crime committed by the occupiers will be collected. Everyone is guilty – who approved, who organized, who blasted these people, who knew about it – they all will be found," Zelensky said.

However, he added, this is not enough now. According to the president, the formal legal recognition of Russia as a terrorist state, in particular, recognition by the U.S. Department of State, is needed not as a political gesture, but as an effective defense of the free world.

"This decision will automatically make it difficult for the terrorist state to exist, and will automatically cut various political and business ties that Russia would maintain otherwise. And all this will happen one hundred percent. It will have to be done – it's only a matter of time and the format of making this decision. And the sooner it happens, the less evil Russia will have time to do," Zelensky said.

Earlier reports said that Ukrainian law enforcement officers had opened a criminal investigation into the shelling by Russian troops of a prison in Olenivka, Donetsk region, which killed about 40 people and injured 130.

According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Russian military deliberately fired at a prison in Olenivka, which housed Ukrainian prisoners of war.

According to Ukrainian intelligence, mercenaries from the Wagner private military company carried out the murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war in the temporarily captured town of Olenivka.