President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has revoked the citizenship of several former influential politicians in the latest step to "cleanse" the country of pro-Russian influences.
"Today, I signed the relevant documents to take another step to protect and cleanse our state from those on the side of the aggressor," Mr Zelenskyy said during his nightly video address.
Mr Zelenskyy would not list the names, but said they had dual Russian citizenship.
According to Ukrainian state media, the list includes several top politicians from the office of Viktor Yanukovych, who served as Ukraine's pro-Russian president from 2010 until he was removed from office in 2014.
The list included Dmytro Tabachnyk, former minister of education and science, Andriy Klyuyev, former deputy prime minister and head of Mr Yanukovych's administration, and Vitaliy Zakharchenko, former interior minister, RBC-Ukraine news agency reported.
Ukraine has stripped a number of people of their Ukrainian citizenship and has sanctioned hundreds of Russian and Belarusian individuals and firms since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year.
Zelenskyy agrees not to attack Russia with weapons supplied by the West
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Mr Zelenskyy agreed that weapons supplied by the West would not be used to attack Russian territory.
"There is a consensus on this point," he said in an interview with the weekly Bild am Sonntag.
Ukraine's Western allies have pledged to arm it with precision rockets and missile systems, as well as tanks, as it tries to push back Russian troops in its east.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has compared the intervention of countries such as Germany with his nation's struggle during World War II.
"Again and again we are forced to repel the aggression of the collective West," he said on Thursday during the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad.
But Mr Scholz rejected the comparison.
"His words are part of a series of absurd historical comparisons that he uses to justify his attack on Ukraine", he said.
"But nothing justifies this war. Together with our allies, we are supplying battle tanks to Ukraine so that it can defend itself. We have carefully weighed each delivery of weapons, in close coordination with our allies, starting with America."
He said that such a consensus-based approach "avoids an escalation".
Ukraine and Russia prisoner swap
Almost 200 Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war returned home following a prisoner swap, officials on both sides reported, while the bodies of two British aid volunteers killed in Ukraine were also recovered.
The Ukrainian president's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said 116 Ukrainians were returned, while Russian news agencies cited Moscow's defence ministry as saying 63 Russian POWs were freed.
He said the released POWs include troops who held out in Mariupol during Moscow's months-long siege that reduced the southern port city to ruins, as well as guerilla fighters from the Kherson region and snipers captured during the ongoing fierce battles for the eastern city of Bakhmut.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address that since the war started last February, Ukraine had secured the release of 1,762 men and women from Russian captivity.
Russian defence officials said those released by Ukraine included some "special category" prisoners whose release was secured following mediation by the United Arab Emirates.
A statement issued on Saturday by the Russian Defence Ministry did not provide details about these "special category" captives.
Mr Yermak also confirmed the bodies of British volunteer aid workers Chris Parry and Andrew Bagshaw had been sent back to Ukraine.
Mr Parry and Mr Bagshaw were killed during an attempted humanitarian evacuation in eastern Ukraine in January, Mr Parry's family has previously said.
At least three civilians have been killed in Ukraine during the past 24 hours as Russian forces struck nine regions in the country's south, north and east, according to reports on Ukrainian TV by regional governors on Saturday morning.
Two people were killed and 14 others wounded in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region by Russian shelling and missile strikes, local Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said in a Telegram update on Saturday morning.
The casualty toll included a man who was killed and seven others who were wounded on Friday after Russian missiles slammed into Toretsk, a town in the Donetsk region.
Mr Kyrylenko said that 34 houses, two kindergartens, an outpatient clinic, a library, a cultural centre and other buildings were damaged in the strike.
Seven teenagers received shrapnel wounds after an anti-personnel mine exploded late on Friday in the north-eastern city of Izium, local Governor Oleh Syniehubov said on Telegram.
He said they were all hospitalised but their lives were not in danger.
Elsewhere, regional Ukrainian officials reported overnight shelling by Russia of border settlements in the northern Sumy region, as well as the town of Marhanets, which neighbours the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Kyiv has long accused Moscow of using the plant, which Russian forces seized early in the war, as a base for launching attacks on Ukrainian-held territory across the Dnieper river.
Accident at Odesa substation causes major power outage
Elsewhere, Ukraine's Black Sea port of Odesa and surrounding areas were plunged into the dark following a large-scale network failure at a substation, the country's grid operator Ukrenergo reported.
The CEO of the state grid operator, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, earlier said critical equipment that had already been damaged several times by Russian missile strikes burst into flames when it could no longer "withstand the load".
The blaze was a new blow to the country's ailing energy grid that has been hammered by Russian strikes for months.
Officials said repairs could take weeks. The government said it would appeal to Turkey for help.
Since October, Moscow has waged a campaign of massive missile attacks on energy infrastructure. Moscow says the strikes aim to reduce Ukraine's ability to fight; Kyiv says they have no military purpose and are intended to hurt civilians.
Odesa regional governor Maksym Marchenko said practically all of the city had lost power after the incident, and that as of Saturday afternoon about 500,000 people faced outages.
That represents about half of Odesa's pre-war population of one million, when it was Ukraine's third largest city.
"Today's power supply (availability) allows to supply the city and the district about 40 or 45 per cent, but if we factor in critical infrastructure, then of course very little is left for ordinary citizens," Mr Kudrytskyi said.
Ukrenergo said in a Telegram update that the failure involved equipment "repeatedly repaired" after Russia's savage strikes on Ukraine's energy grid, and that residents should brace themselves for lengthy blackouts.
"Unfortunately, the scale of the accident is quite significant, and this time, the power supply restrictions will be longer," the company said.
"It is not yet possible to determine a specific time when [power] will be fully restored."
The temperature in Odesa was at two degrees Celsius on Saturday and is due to dip below freezing for much of the next week.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said that the energy ministry was sending "all the powerful generators it has in stock" to Odesa "within 24 hours" and that both the Ukrainian energy minister and the head of Ukrenergo were on their way to Odesa to oversee repair works.
ABC/wires
