Russia 'launches massive air, rocket and artillery strikes' after bruising losses

•  Ukraine expects the quantity of Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure to grow, a senior presidential aide told Reuters on Tuesday evening.

• Russia is carrying out "massive strikes" across the Ukrainian front line, Moscow claimed, after suffering bruising losses in recent days

• Russia has suspended sending new units to Ukraine due to recent major losses and distrust of the military command, according to the Institute for the Study of War 

• Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping will discuss Ukraine and Taiwan at a meeting in Uzbekistan on Thursday

• Ukraine has accused Germany of ignoring its pleas for military hardware while offering "abstract fears and excuses" as justification

Ukraine expects the quantity of Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure to grow, a senior presidential aide told Reuters on Tuesday evening.

Referring to Sunday's strike on a major coal power and water heating plant in the city of Kharkiv, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said "we expect the quantity of such attacks to grow, and are ready for various scenarios."

Podolyak added that Ukrainians should expect problems with power and heat this winter. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that Ukraine is going to win this war and that the Kremlin faces a historic crisis of confidence, Ben Hodges writes. 

Indeed, I now believe it is a genuine possibility that Vladimir Putin’s exposed weaknesses are so severe that we might be witnessing the beginning of the end – not only of his regime, but of the Russian Federation itself.

This vast empire encompassing more than 120 ethnic groups is on an unsustainable footing, and like that famous Hemingway quote, its collapse may be gradual at first but could quickly become a sudden, violent and uncontrollable event. If we fail to prepare for this possibility in the way that we failed to prepare for the collapse of the Soviet Union, it could introduce immense instability to our geopolitics.

Read more:  Prepare for Russia itself to disintegrate

Britain and the United States played a critical role in helping Ukraine pull off its lightning advance to reclaim swathes of Russian-held territory.

Ukraine had begun talks months ago with US officials about how best to proceed with the war, according to the New York Times. 

Through two rounds of war games, the first with the US and the second with Britain as well, Ukraine was able to refine its offensive and conclude it needed to launch two offensives rather than one – in Kherson and near Kharkiv. 

“We did do some modelling and some tabletop exercises,” Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s policy chief, told the New York Times.

“That set of exercises suggested that certain avenues for a counteroffensive were likely to be more successful than others. We provided that advice, and then the Ukrainians internalized that and made their own decision.”

Ukrainian spearheads advanced more than 30 miles into Russian-held territory by Thursday, in one of the fastest offensive operations of the war so far, according to Ukraine's general staff.

Reports are emerging of  "outrageous" treatment of civilians in Kharkiv, said President Vladimir Putin's spokesman.

"There are a lot of punitive measures... people are being tortured, people are being mistreated and so on," Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

Russia's allegations came after Ukrainian authorities claimed to have found four bodies of civilians with "signs of torture" in the recaptured eastern village of Zaliznychne.

Russia on Tuesday slammed what it termed "bias" from UN human rights bodies after the latter accused Moscow of trying to silence Kremlin opponents.

Russian diplomat Ilya Barmin blasted what he termed "the unprecedented rise in bias and politicisation" of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Addressing the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Mr Barmin said the acting high commissioner mentioned Russia in a Monday statement "while ignoring mass human rights violations in Europe, the US and other countries of the collective West".

Moscow quit the council after the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution suspending it from the Human Rights Council last April following the invasion of Ukraine.

Kharkiv is littered with ‘booby traps’ since Russian forces retreated, according to CNN.

Ukraine has captured dozens of villages in the region, yet Russian soldiers remain “wandering in the forests”, Stepan Maselskyi, head of the Izium district military-civilian administration, told the broadcaster. 

He added that huge amounts of abandoned ammunition have been left behind, making the situation perilous. 

There is a "very big danger [with munitions left behind]. A lot of ‘booby traps,’ a lot of explosive items left, scattered," he said.

Denmark has agreed to train Ukrainian soldiers on Danish soil, local news reported.

Defence Minister Morten Bodskov made the comments after meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart in Kyiv on Tuesday, the Ritzau news agency reported.

Mr Bodskov could not provide details about the number of Ukrainian soldiers, or timing or location of the training.

"I cannot get into the details, but there will be training of the Ukrainian defence in Denmark," the minister told the news agency.

The defence ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The EU is looking to send more money to further support the Ukrainian army, adding to the billions of euros already sent, the bloc's diplomacy chief said on Tuesday.

Josep Borrell did not give a figure, but the EU has already sent 2.5 billion euros (£2.16 billion) in total to Ukraine and his office indicated it would be of the same magnitude as the five previous tranches, each 500 million euros.

"We'll be putting some concrete requests on the table soon. We're going to move up to the sixth military assistance tranche coming up via the European Peace Facility," Mr Borrell told the European Parliament.

Ukraine uses the money to pay for weapons as it fights a Russian invasion. NATO countries have also supplied material from their arsenals.

It is too early to say whether recent gains made by Ukraine in the east of the country at the expense of Russia are a turning point in the war, a Western official said on Tuesday.

"It's too early to say whether this is a turning point in the war, but it's a moment that has power in terms of both operations... and psychology," the official said

A Russian politician who made waves by questioning Russia's strategy in Ukraine on national television said on Tuesday he spoke the truth and does not fear punishment.

During a talk show on state-controlled NTV on Sunday, Mr Nadezhdin said President Putin had been misled by intelligence services that apparently told him Ukrainian resistance would be brief and ineffective. Mr Nadezhdin also called for fighting to end and negotiations to begin.

Russia has attempted to stifle criticism of the war. In March it imposed a law carrying a  jail term of up to 15 years for anyone spreading intentionally "fake" news about the military

Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping will discuss Ukraine and Taiwan at a meeting in Uzbekistan on Thursday.

"The presidents will discuss both the bilateral agenda and the main regional and international topics," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said at a briefing in Moscow.

"Naturally, they will give a positive assessment of the unprecedentedly high level of trust within the bilateral strategic partnership," he added.

Mr Ushakov said Moscow values China's position towards what he called the "Ukraine crisis", saying Beijing had struck a "balanced approach" towards the conflict.

An ammonia gas deal which the United Nations is pushing Russia and Ukraine to agree could ultimately stabilise a landmark grain deal, a Western diplomat briefed on the matter told Reuters.

Under the proposed ammonia deal, ammonia gas owned by Russian fertiliser producer Uralchem would be brought via pipeline to the Russia-Ukraine border. There it would be purchased by U.S.-headquarted commodities trader Trammo, the diplomat said.

Trammo would then own the ammonia as it travels across Ukraine, paying Ukraine pumping fees and transit fees, and sell it onto world markets from Ukraine's Black Sea, according to the proposal.

"The actual financial flows are not insignificant," the Western diplomat told Reuters.

Members of Russia’s intelligence and military are attempting to secretly sell their homes and flee the south of the country, according to Ukraine’s ministry of defence. 

Ukraine’s recent battlefield successes have forced Russian proxies, FSB employees and commanders of some military units in Crimea and the south to “urgently resettle their families to the territory of the russian federation”, said the ministry’s defence intelligence division. 

"At the same time, the invaders have banned [the] sale and purchase transactions of housing, have set restrictions on movement across the Crimean bridge and are trying in every possible way to close access to information about the counteroffensive actions of the defenders of Ukraine."

Russia has suspended sending new units to Ukraine due to recent major losses and distrust of the military command, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based Think Tank.

Large number of volunteers are refusing to fight as morale drops in the wake of Ukraine’s recent successful counter offensives.

Ukraine claims to have recaptured about 3,000 square kilometres of territory, including the key cities of Izyum and Kupiansk, in a lightning offensive that began last week.

“The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the Russian military command has suspended sending new, already-formed units to Ukraine due to recent Russian losses and widespread distrust of the Russian military command, factors which have caused a large number of volunteers to categorically refuse to participate in combat,” said the ISW.

“This assessment is still unconfirmed, but low morale due to Ukrainian counteroffensive success may prove devastating to the Kremlin’s already-poor ability to generate meaningful combat capability.”

Russia will not be invited to the Queen’s funeral because of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Roland Oliphant writes.

The snub makes Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin one of only three national governments banned from the funeral.

Some 500 foreign dignitaries are expected to attend Monday’s funeral at Westminster Abbey, making it the largest international gathering the UK has hosted in decades.

Diplomatic sources said it was “the equivalent of standing up hundreds of state visits in the space of two weeks. We usually only do a couple of those a year.” 

Read more:  Putin not invited to Queen’s funeral after invading Ukraine

Russia is preparing to renew shelling of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the Kyiv Independent is reporting. 

Citing Ukrainian intelligence, the newspaper added the danger to other nuclear facilities remains high.

Moscow and Kyiv accuse each other of shelling the nuclear plant, Europe's largest, risking a nuclear disaster.

UN inspectors have found that a radiation monitoring system had been damaged during the recent spate of shelling, leaving engineers unable to detect potential leaks from the spent fuel pools.

"Putin wants to plunge Ukraine and all of Europe into a dark, cold winter," said Yuriy Yusov, spokesperson for Ukraine's defence intelligence agency.

Ukraine called on the West to speed up deliveries of weapons systems to help it liberate all its territory after sucessfully driving back Russian forces in the northeast. 

Ukrainian troops have recaptured dozens of towns in a stunning shift in battleground momentum.

Fighting was still raging in the northeastern Kharkiv region, Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar told Reuters on Tuesday, saying Ukraine's forces were making good progress because they are highly motivated and their operation is well planned.

"The aim is to liberate the Kharkiv region and beyond - all the territories occupied by the Russian Federation," she said.

In a video address late on Monday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said the West must speed up deliveries of weapons systems, calling on Ukraine's allies to "strengthen cooperation to defeat Russian terror".

Ukraine has accused Germany of ignoring its pleas for military hardware while offering "abstract fears and excuses" as justification. 

"Disappointing signals from Germany while Ukraine needs Leopards and Marders now — to liberate people and save them from genocide," Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted.

His comments come as Ukraine presses a counter-offensive to retake land in the east and south from Russian forces.

Ukraine's "Not a single rational argument on why these weapons cannot be supplied, only abstract fears and excuses. What is Berlin afraid of that Kyiv is not?" he wrote, in unusually blunt language.

Russia has launched "massive strikes" on all front lines in Ukraine, after Kyiv's forces made dramatic advances in a counter-offensive.

"Air, rocket and artillery forces are carrying out massive strikes on units of the Ukrainian armed forces in all operational directions," the Russian defence ministry said on Tuesday.

Russia has pulled back its forces from swathes of northeast Ukraine, particularly in the Kharkiv region, after Ukrainian troops launched a lightning counter-offensive to wrest back territory held by Moscow's forces.

The defence ministry said it had launched "high-precision" strikes on Ukrainian positions around Sloviansk and Konstantinovka in the eastern Donetsk region.

Moscow's forces in the region have reported fierce battles with Ukrainian forces over recent days.

Russia has lost more than 53,000 army personnel since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence.

In its latest tally of enemy losses, the ministry said 53,300 personnel had been killed between February 24 and September 13. The greatest losses were suffered over the past day, it added.

“[The] Russian enemy suffered the greatest losses (of the past day) at the Kharkiv and Donetsk directions.”

Ukrainian forces reached the Russian border yesterday after liberating Kharkiv and routing the units defending it .

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and members of a Russian delegation have been granted visas to attend the United Nations' General Assembly, Russian news reported.

Russia has for weeks criticised the United States for not granting members of the Russian delegation visas to attend the 77th session of the assembly, which opens in New York on Tuesday.

"Today, visas were given to Lavrov and a number of those who will accompany him," Interfax news quoted the foreign ministry as saying.

Moscow has accused the United States of trying to block Russia's full participation in the general assembly by delaying the granting of visas for Russians to attend. 

The EU must unite in the face of Russian "blackmail" over energy supplies, said Finland’s Prime Minister.

Sanna Marin accused Russia of weaponising energy by severely reducing gas supplies and called for more sanctions against Moscow.  

Her call, made to the European Parliament sitting in Strasbourg, France, came a day before EU chief Ursula von der Leyen was to deliver her annual "State of the European Union" address to be dominated by the impact of the war in Ukraine on Europe.

"Blackmailing our societies through energy supply is a way for Russia to crumble and destroy Europeans' support to Ukraine and to destroy our unity."

Invites to the Queen’s funeral have not been sent to Russia, Belarus and Myanmar, while Iran will only be represented at an ambassadorial level, Whitehall sources said.

Former Tory leader Lord Hague said "of course" there will be diplomacy at the Queen's funeral.

But he said world leaders are coming to pay their respects to an "extraordinary head of state" - and that is what "90% of it will be about".

Asked if there will be politics at the funeral, he told Times Radio: "Of course there is some diplomacy - you can't have that number of people together from around the world without them starting to say, 'well, what do you think is happening in Ukraine?' - of course there is going to be some of that.

"Nevertheless, they're coming because they want to pay their respects to this extraordinary head of state. And that is what 90% of it will be about."

Ukraine's military claimed Tuesday for the first time that it encountered an Iranian-supplied suicide drone used by Russia on the battlefield, showing the deepening ties between Moscow and Tehran as the Islamic Republic's tattered nuclear deal with world powers hangs in the balance.

U.S. intelligence publicly warned back in July that Tehran planned to send hundreds of the bomb-carrying drones to Russia to aid its war on Ukraine. While Iran initially denied it, the head of its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard has boasted in recent days about arming the world's top powers.

A Ukrainian military official, as well as a pro-Ukrainian army website closely associated with the military, published images of the wreckage of the drone. It resembled a triangle, or delta-shaped, drone flown by Iran known as the Shahed, or "Witness" in Farsi.

The military official and the website both said Ukrainian troops encountered the drone near Kupiansk amid Kyiv's offensive that has punched through Russian lines around Kharkiv on the eastern front.

The image suggested the Shahed drone had been shot down by Ukrainian forces and hadn't detonated on impact as designed, though little other information was immediately released by Kyiv. An inscription on the drone identified it as an "M214 Geran-2," which didn't immediately correspond to known Russian weaponry.

Iran's mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Fighting is still raging in the Kharkiv region but Ukraine's forces are making good progress because its troops are highly motivated and its operation is well planned, deputy defence minister Hanna Malyar told Reuters on Tuesday.

"The aim is to liberate the Kharkiv region and beyond - all the territories occupied by the Russian Federation. Fighting is continuing (in Kharkiv region). It is still early to say full (Ukrainian) control has been established over Kharkiv region," Malyar said in an interview.

Russia has largely ceded its gains near Kharkiv and many of the withdrawing Russian soldiers have fled across the border into Russia, a senior US military official said on Monday.

Reports of Russian forces abandoning their equipment "could be indicative of Russia's disorganised command and control," the official said.

It follows a weekend of rapid gains for Ukrainian forces. Ukraine's general staff said its soldiers had recaptured more than 20 towns and villages in just the past day, as Ukrainian forces swept deeper into territory seized from fleeing Russian troops.

The official said: "On the ground in the vicinity of Kharkiv we assess that Russian forces have largely ceded their gains to the Ukrainians and have withdrawn to the north and east. Many of these forces have moved over the border into Russia."

Elsewhere, Ukraine's southern command said its forces had recaptured 500 square km of territory in the south, killing 59 Russian troops in the past 24 hours and destroying 20 pieces of equipment.

It is likely to take Russia years to rebuild the army it has allocated to lead counter-attacks in the event of a war with Nato, a British intelligence update has suggested.

Elements of Vladimir Putin's forces withdrawn from the Kharkiv region of Ukraine over the past week were from the 1st Guards Tank Army (1 GTA), which had already suffered "heavy casualties" in the initial phase of the invasion, according to the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

This army - one of the most "prestigious" in Russia - is allocated to the defence of Moscow and intended to lead counter-attacks in the case of a war with Nato, the department said.

Now that it has been "severely degraded", Russia's conventional force designed to counter the Western alliance is badly weakened, the MoD said, and is likely to take years to rebuild.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, head of the Royal Air Force, said the aircraft that will carry the Queen's coffin to London has been used for aid missions in Ukraine and was also used last year to help evacuate people from Afghanistan.

"It's a C-17 Globemaster, which is our strategic airlifter, but on this very sad occasion it will be carrying Her Majesty's coffin down from Edinburgh to RAF Northolt," he told Sky News.

"As you can imagine, there's a lot of planning goes into a unique task like this, and we've worked closely with the Palace to deliver it to their wishes, and it's a day that we all clearly hoped would never come.

He added: "It's a heavily used aircraft - it carried the majority of the 15,000 people that we evacuated from Kabul last summer.

"And since then, it's been involved in airlifting humanitarian aid and lethal aid nodes to support Ukraine."

The US supplied intelligence to help Ukraine's counteroffensive, US officials have confirmed.

They declined to say how much information the US had provided, or whether Western officials had helped strategise the idea to throw Russian forces off guard by calling attention to attack plans in the south, while actually plotting a more formidable campaign in the east.

The US provided information "on conditions" in the country, said one of the officials, but "in the end, this was the Ukrainian choice. The Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian political leadership made the decisions on how to conduct this counteroffensive."

Ukraine's southern command said its forces had recaptured 500 square km of territory in the south, killing 59 Russian troops in the past 24 hours and destroying 20 pieces of equipment.

The situation there could not be independently confirmed.

Ukraine said on Monday that its forces regained yet more ground in 24 hours and retook an area seven times the size of Kyiv this month, as Russia responded with strikes on some recaptured areas.

The territorial shifts marked one of Russia's biggest reversals since its troops were turned back from Kyiv in the earliest days of the nearly seven months of fighting, yet Moscow signalled it was no closer to agreeing to a negotiated peace.

The retreat of Russian troops in recent days has drawn weeping and relieved locals into bomb-cratered streets, including on Sunday in the strategic but heavily damaged town of Izyum.

"It's not enough to say I'm happy. I just don't have enough words to express myself," said Yuriy Kurochka, 64.

China is willing to shape the international order together with Russia in a "more just and rational direction", a senior Chinese diplomat said as the two countries' leaders prepare to meet this week.

Former Cold War allies with a tempestuous relationship, China and Russia have drawn closer in recent years as part of what they call a "no limits" relationship acting as a counterweight to the global dominance of the United States.

"Under the strategic guidance of President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin, the relationship between the two countries has always moved forward on the right track," the Communist Party's foreign affairs chief Yang Jiechi told Russia's ambassador to China Andrey Denisov on Monday, according to a foreign ministry readout.

Yang said China was "willing to work with Russia to continuously implement the spirit of high-level strategic cooperation between the two countries, safeguard the common interests of both sides, and promote the development of the international order in a more just and rational direction", according to the ministry.

As Ukrainian flags were hoisted over towns in the north east for the first time in months, overjoyed residents have been embracing their liberators with hugs, kisses and even watermelons in some of the most joyous scenes since the war began, Joe Barnes writes.

The rout of Russian troops in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region has been a cause for celebration for many forced to endure occupation since the early days of the conflict.  

Footage - some filmed by Ukrainian soldiers and some by the residents receiving them - shows civilians with tears of joy after more than 40 towns and villages were liberated in a lightning push through Russian lines.

Read more: Ukrainians greet liberating soldiers with hugs, kisses and watermelons

Volodymyr Zelensky is calling on the West to speed up deliveries of weapons systems as Ukrainian troops move to consolidate control over a large area of northeastern territory seized back from Russia.

Since Moscow abandoned its main bastion in northeastern Ukraine on Saturday, marking its worst defeat since the early days of the war, Ukrainian troops have recaptured dozens of towns in a stunning shift in battleground momentum.

A senior US military official said Russia has largely ceded territory near Kharkiv in the northeast and pulled many of its troops back over the border.

Washington and its allies have provided Ukraine with billions of dollars in weapons that Kyiv says have helped limit Russian gains. In a video address late on Monday, Mr Zelensky said Ukraine and the West must “strengthen cooperation to defeat Russian terror”.

Volodymyr Zelensky will on Tuesday speak with the International Monetary Fund to push the global lender for a significant financing program, according to a report.

Ukraine's president is set to hold talks with Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF's managing director, as Kyiv seeks as much as $15 billion to $20 billion (£12.8 billion to £17.1 billion), Reuters reported.

Such a large amount is seen as unlikely to win IMF approval but demonstrates Kyiv's need for financial help as its economy is ravaged by the war with Russia

The IMF Executive Board, at an informal session on Monday, discussed a plan that could offer Ukraine $1.4 billion in emergency aid through the IMF's Rapid Financing Instrument.

• Ukrainian forces reached parts of the Russian border in their lightning offensive that has led to the firing of a top Russian general
• The Kremlin on Monday insisted it would still win its war against Ukraine despite the collapse and rout of its army group near Kharkiv
• Lt Gen Roman Berdnikov, the commander of Russia’s Western army group, which was responsible for that part of the front, was relieved of command on Sunday, according to Ukraine’s military intelligence service
• Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, vowed that the “special military operation” would continue
• Ukraine’s ministry of defence on Monday said it had liberated 20 more settlements in the previous 24 hours
• Britain’s defence intelligence said Ukraine had recaptured an area twice the size of greater London during the course of the lightning offensive that began last Tuesday
• Ukraine’s nuclear operator said the last reactor at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was shut down on Sunday
• A war commentator invited on to Russian state television told viewers that Vladimir Putin has been misled by advisers and said Ukraine cannot be defeated, in what appeared to be a rare example of sanctioned criticism