Russia-Ukraine war latest: what we know on day 224 of the invasion | World news

The UN rights has outlined the “unspeakable suffering and devastation” inflicted on Ukrainians. Christian Salazar Volkmann, presenting a report on rights in Ukraine to the UN human rights council in Geneva, said “disturbing accounts” were emerging of violations in detention, of both civilians and prisoners of war, while enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention had become “widespread” in territory controlled by Russia and its proxies. There were two documented cases of Ukrainian servicemen having been tortured to death, he said.

About 2,000 videos, photographs and audio files of alleged war crimes have been submitted to the UN mandated international commission of inquiry (UN COI) on Ukraine. The footage was captured through an app designed to create verifiable evidence.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, announced that dozens of regions in Ukraine have been liberated from Russian occupation, appearing to confirm information from Russia’s maps that show Russia withdrawing from eastern and western Ukraine.

Joe Biden, the US president, has told Zelenskiy that Washington will provide Kyiv with $625m (£544m) in new security assistance, including high mobility artillery rocket system (Himars) launchers.

Two women in Russia-annexed Crimea, including Miss Crimea, have been found guilty of discrediting the Russian army by singing a patriotic Ukrainian song.

European Union finance ministers agreed to integrate the EU’s support payments to Ukraine into its 2023 budget to make payments more structured and predictable.

The EU has summoned Russia’s envoy to condemn and reject Moscow’s “illegal annexation” of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, the EU diplomatic service has said.

Ukraine’s economy will shrink at a rate eight times that of Russia this year as a result of the war triggered by Moscow’s invasion in February, the World Bank has estimated.

Russia is at risk of losing control of the strategic towns critical to retaining the city of Kherson and eventually Crimea, western officials said, but they warned the fighting along the Dnieper river “will not be an easy rush into constrained territory”.

The upper house of Russia’s parliament voted to approve the incorporation of four occupied Ukrainian regions into Russia, as Moscow sets about formally annexing territory it seized from Kyiv since staging its latest invasion of Ukraine in February. In a session on Tuesday, the Federation Council unanimously ratified legislation to annex the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, after a similar vote in the state Duma, Russia’s lower house. No lawmakers in the lower house voted against the bill either.

Zelenskiy has signed a decree formally declaring the prospect of any Ukrainian talks with Vladimir Putin “impossible”. The decree formalised comments made by Zelenskiy on Friday after the Russian president proclaimed the four occupied regions of Ukraine were to become part of Russia.

Russia, however, no longer has full control of any of the four provinces it claims to have annexed, after Ukrainian troops reportedly advanced dozens of kilometres in Kherson province. The Russian military has acknowledged that Kyiv’s forces had broken through in the Kherson region. It said the Ukrainian army and its “superior tank units” had managed to “penetrate the depths of our defence” around the villages of Zoltaya Balka and Alexsandrovka.

Russia’s retreat from Lyman has sparked vociferous criticism of the handling of the war on Russian state television. Vladimir Solovyov, host of a primetime talkshow on state TV channel Russia 1 and one of the Kremlin’s biggest cheerleaders, said on air on Sunday: “We need to pull it together, make unpopular, but necessary decisions and act.”

The self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) has claimed that in the last 24 hours two people were injured on the territory it occupies, and 13 houses and 12 pieces of civil infrastructure damaged by fire from the Ukrainian armed forces.

A Russian court has fined the streaming service Twitch 4m roubles (£60,000/$68,000) for failing to remove an interview with a Ukrainian political figure. The court said the interview violated Russian laws on the spreading of fake information. The laws are used to suppress criticism of Russia’s war effort.

North Korea has become the only UN member state apart from Russia to recognise the “results” of the Moscow-backed “referendums” in the occupied areas of Ukraine.

Diplomatic relations between Russia and Japan continue to deteriorate. Japanese foreign minister Yoshimasa Hayashi has ordered a Russian consul in Sapporo to leave Japan by 10 October.

The Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) will restore its network to oppose the partial mobilisation aimed at bolstering Russia’s forces in Ukraine, close Navalny ally Ivan Zhdanov said in a video published on social media. Russian authorities have designated Alexei Navalny’s organisations “extremist” after months of increasing repression against his supporters, putting FBK employees, volunteers and sympathisers at risk of prosecution and imprisonment.