Russia and Ukraine free 200 captured troops in New Year prisoner swap

Russia and Ukraine said they had freed more than 200 captured soldiers on Saturday, the latest prisoner exchange between the two sides in the 10-month-old conflict.

Russia's Defence Ministry said 82 Russian soldiers had been released by Ukraine, while the Ukrainian president's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said Russia had handed over 140 Ukrainian service personnel.

Some of the 132 Ukrainian men and eight women who were freed had been wounded or had fought to defend the Black Sea port city of Mariupol, and on Snake Island, Yermak said in a message on his Telegram page.

The two sides have exchanged hundreds of captured soldiers in several rounds of prisoner exchanges in recent months, despite a complete breakdown in broader diplomatic talks between Moscow and Kyiv.

Russia fired more than 20 cruise missiles at targets in Ukraine on Saturday, killing at least one person in the capital Kyiv and injuring more than a dozen in what one official described as "terror on New Year's Eve".

In three days, Moscow's second major missile attack badly damaged a hotel south of Kyiv's centre and a residential building in another district. A Japanese journalist was among the wounded and taken to hospital, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

Despite the prisoner swap, Russia has been attacking vital infrastructure in Ukraine since October with barrages of missiles and drones, causing sweeping power blackouts and other outages for millions of people as the cold weather bites.

"This time, Russia's mass missile attack is deliberately targeting residential areas, not even our energy infrastructure," Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter after the attack.

"War criminal Putin 'celebrates' New Year by killing people," Kuleba said, calling for Russia to be deprived of its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Reuters correspondents heard a series of loud explosions in Kyiv that came in two separate waves.

Army chief Valeriy Zaluzhnyi said air defences shot down 12 incoming cruise missiles, including six around the Kyiv region, five in the Zhytomyrskiy region and one in the Khmeltnytskiy region.

The cruise missiles had been launched from Russian strategic bombers over the Caspian Sea hundreds of miles away, and from land-based launchers, he said on Telegram.

Ukraine's human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets described the attack as "Terror on New Year's Eve".

"The terrorist country is congratulating the Ukrainian people with missiles. But we are indestructible and unconquerable. There is no fear, but the fury is rising. We will definitely win," Lubinets said.

Kyiv's mayor said 30 per cent of consumers were without electricity in the capital due to the introduction of emergency blackouts, but residents had central heating and running water.