The latest five deaths announced by Moscow's medical emergency service brought to at least 76 the number of people killed in Russia's lethal deep freeze of the last week.

In addition to the dead, 19 people were hospitalised suffering from hypothermia, the official ITAR-TASS news agency said, noting that most of the victims were homeless people or were in an inebriated state.

The Siberian temperatures in the capital eased slightly from earlier in the week, reaching on Saturday minus 23 C (minus 9 F) in the city and minus 25 (minus 13 F) in the surrounding region.

But high winds meant the relative "warming" was almost imperceptible.

Homeless people continued to have special dispensation to huddle in metro station entrances, while the usual open-air street traders were largely absent.

Pundits continued to speculate on how long Moscow's ageing heating system would be able to cope, after the head of the UES electricity monopoly, Anatoly Chubais, warned that the system was working at its limits.

"We think the heating system will hold out, but it's really like reading the tea-leaves," the head of the upper house of parliament's industry committee, Valentin Zavadnikov, told Kommersant newspaper.

"The system needs reforming so we don't have to rely on guess-work," he said.

Other parts of Russia continued to shiver at even colder temperatures.

Temperatures in the Volga region and in north-west Russia were forecast to remain as low as minus 40 C (minus 40 F).

Federal officials had ordered the dispatch of emergency fuel supplies to affected regions, including 60,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil to be sent to Saint Petersburg and nearly 400,000 tonnes of coal to the Russian Far East, Kommersant said.

Accidents caused by exploding gas canisters in people's homes continued to cause injuries.

Eleven residents were injured when a gas cylinder exploded in a housing block in the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg, Interfax reported, quoting emergency services.

Kommersant reported that 7,000 people had been left without heating due to technical problems in the city of Chelyabinsk, in the Ural mountains.

Transport also struggled to cope, with around 50 cars stuck in snow on the Moscow-Volgograd highway near Voronezh, news agencies reported. In Moscow the cold has snapped trolley-bus wires, obliging the city authorities to put on diesel-powered buses instead.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.