Russia-Ukraine updates: Russian missiles hit close to nuclear reactors: IAEA director

Russia has dismissed reports from Ukrainian officials that Russian missiles struck residential areas in the southern town of Odesa early on Friday morning and reiterated its claim that Moscow does not target civilians.

“I would like to remind you of president [Vladimir Putin's] words that the Russian Armed Forces do not engage with civilian targets,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on a conference call with reporters on Friday.

Ukrainian authorities had earlier said Russian missiles hit an apartment building and two holiday camps in the region, killing at least 20 people and wounding dozens of others, including children.

To counter the threat of indiscriminate Russian strikes, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg pledged more supplies of advanced weapons and equipment to Ukraine on Thursday.

Speaking at a press conference in Madrid, Stoltenberg said NATO has a list of requested equipment and nothing would be ruled out or excluded from that list. Several NATO countries expressed reservations about the transfer of some weapons –- including tanks and other heavy weapons -– to Ukraine in the first months of the war.

-ABC News' Edward Szekeres, Max Uzol, Fidel Pavlenko and Yuriy Zaliznyak

In response to the invasion of Ukraine, the West has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia, nearly crippling its economy and isolating it from all but a few allies.

U.S. President Joe Biden and other government officials have said sanctions from the United States and its allies will make Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, pariahs on the world stage.

However, one expert who spoke with ABC News says that casting Russia out of the international community, making it a pariah state, may not be so easy.

"Russia is a member of the UN security council, it has veto power there. It is just a major actor on the world stage in so many ways. So isolating Russia, shaming it, making it a pariah is a huge challenge," said Daniel Hamilton, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute.

Yet, "Russia has not done too well with allies," Hamilton also said.

"Today, it's real allies are ... sort of also pariah states. It's Assad's Syria, it's Venezuela, it's Cuba and that's about it. Others tolerate Russia. They figure out ways to deal with it, in the former Soviet space. But they're not really allies," Hamilton said.

Russia and Belarus are yet to mirror NATO's recent military activity, Belarusian President Oleksandr Lukashenko said in a speech on Thursday. Lukashenko also called on Russia to “be ready” for the use of nuclear weapons.

While a frontal attack on Ukraine from Belarusian territory is not perceived as an imminent threat by Ukrainian officials, roadblocks were reinforced in the capital of Kyiv due to the risk of diversionary and intelligence groups from Belarus roaming around the city, a National Guard spokesperson said Friday as reported by local media.

Belarus extended a large-scale military exercise near the Ukrainian border until at least July 9, a local monitoring group reported on Friday.

Lukashenko's administration ordered conscripts en masse to report to military commissariats without disclosing the reason for the call-up, local media reported on Thursday.

Military officials threatened conscripts with criminal prosecution in case they failed to show up to their respective commissariats, according to local reports.

Belarusian officials maintain that the call-up is “simply training” that is part of “mobilization exercises.” “No one is taking anyone to any war,” military officials claimed as quoted by local media.

-ABC News' Edward Szekeres, Max Uzol, Fidel Pavlenko and Yuriy Zaliznyak

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the situation on Snake Island, which was freed of Russian forces Thursday, "significantly changes the situation in the Black Sea."

"It does not guarantee safety yet, it does not yet guarantee that the enemy will not return. But it already limits the actions of the occupiers significantly," he said in his latest national address.

The rocky Ukrainian island, located in the Black Sea, has been the target of Russia since day one of the invasion.

Ukrainian military officials claimed Thursday to have taken back control of Snake Island overnight following a successful military operation. Meanwhile, the Russian defense ministry said Thursday that it withdrew all its forces from Snake Island as a "gesture of goodwill."

-ABC News' Christine Theodorou and Joe Simonetti