President says more than 10 others injured in the capital with further blasts across the country

Russia’s upper house of parliament has asked the finance ministry to draw up a law that would impose retaliatory measures on the West if it moves against frozen Russian assets, the TASS state news agency reported.

The Financial Times reported on 3 February that the G7 had drawn up plans to use frozen Russian assets as collateral to raise money to help Ukraine.

Ukraine’s air force said it had intercepted 15 out of 20 drones and 29 out of 44 missiles

A barrage of Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian cities killed five people on Wednesday and injured 50 more, including a pregnant woman.

“It’s another massive attack against our state,” president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a statement.

Russia, which boasts of taking in 700,000 children, stands accused of trying to erase their Ukrainian identity

During the 14 months for which Veronika Vlasenko attended school in Russia, she was regularly told by teachers and fellow students that she would never be able to go home to Ukraine. “Every day they said to me that I would be staying here for ever and would never leave Russia,” she said. “They told me that Ukraine doesn’t exist, that it never existed, that we’re all Russians … At times the other kids would beat me for being pro-Ukrainian.”

Veronika was one of nearly 20,000 children documented by Ukrainian authorities as having been taken from Ukraine to Russia over the past two years. The authorities believe the real number is probably 10 times that, while Russian officials have even boasted of moving 700,000 Ukrainian children to Russia.

GUR agency says it is working to confirm whether Oleg Sergeevich Stegachyov, ‘directly involved in missile strikes on Ukraine’, survived attack

• What we know on day 711

Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been visiting Ukrainian troops on the southeastern front and handing out medals, his office said on Sunday.

Reuters reports that the move comes amid intense speculation that his popular army chief could soon be sacked.

Russian claims that western weapons used in attack on town in Moscow-controlled Luhansk region

Russia’s emergencies ministry said workers had retrieved the bodies of 20 people from the rubble following a Ukrainian attack on a building housing a bakery in the city of Lysychansk in the occupied eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk.

On Saturday, the ministry shared video of emergency workers lifting two bloodied people on to stretchers and carrying them out of the ruins of a building. It said previously that its workers rescued 10 people and handed them to doctors.

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Poland’s president Duda sought to defuse the row over his statement on Ukraine, saying in a post on X that his “actions and position on Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine have been and are clear from day one”.

He added:

Russia’s attack on Ukraine and occupation of internationally recognised territories of Ukraine, including Crimea, is a crime... We all stand shoulder to shoulder for a free, sovereign and independent Ukraine against aggression and brutal imperialism!

Election commission finding could disqualify anti-war Boris Nadezhdin from running

Russia’s elections commission has said it found “dead souls” among the more than 100,000 signatures of support submitted by Boris Nadezhdin, the sole anti-war candidate in next month’s presidential election, in a sign that he could be disqualified from a carefully managed ballot meant to deliver victory for Vladimir Putin.

Nadezhdin, a veteran politician who has associated with Kremlin insiders and the opposition to Putin, has been waging a last-minute campaign to get on the ballot for the election, with thousands of Russians standing for hours in the freezing cold to add their signature in his support.

Both sides confirm exchange of about 200 prisoners each a week after Russian transport aircraft shot down near border

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest news updates

Russia and Ukraine have conducted a major prisoner-of-war exchange a week after a previous swap was prevented when a Russian Il-76 transport plane was shot down and exploded near the border between the two countries.

Both sides said about 200 prisoners each had been exchanged on Wednesday, although they disagreed about the exact figures.