Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” in a failed bid to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, federal prosecutors said in a newly unsealed court filing that argues that the former US president is not entitled to immunity from prosecution.

The filing was unsealed on Wednesday. It was submitted by special counsel Jack Smith’s team following a supreme court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents and narrowed the scope of the prosecution.

Trump’s legal team have employed a delaying strategy in all the numerous legal cases that Trump faces that has mostly been successful.

The 165-page filing is probably the last opportunity for prosecutors to detail their case against Trump before the 5 November election given there will not be a trial before Trump faces the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris.

Prosecutors laid out details including an allegation that a White House staffer heard Trump tell family members that it did not matter if he won or lost the election, “you still have to fight like hell”.

The new filing cites previously unknown accounts offered by Trump’s closest aides to paint a portrait of an “increasingly desperate” president who, while losing his grip on the White House, “used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process”.

“So what?” the filing quotes Trump as telling an aide after being alerted that his vice-president, Mike Pence, was in potential danger after a crowd of violent supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6.

“The details don’t matter,” Trump said, when told by an adviser that a lawyer who was mounting his legal challenges would not be able to prove the false allegations in court, the filing states.

The filing includes details of conversations between Trump and Pence, including a private lunch the two had on 12 November 2020, in which Pence “reiterated a face-saving option” for Trump, telling him: “Don’t concede but recognize the process is over,” according to prosecutors.

In another private lunch days later, Pence urged Trump to accept the results of the election and run again in 2024.

“I don’t know, 2024 is so far off,” Trump told him, according to the filing.

But Trump “disregarded” Pence “in the same way he disregarded dozens of court decisions that unanimously rejected his and his allies’ legal claims, and that he disregarded officials in the targeted states – including those in his own party – who stated publicly that he had lost and that his specific fraud allegations were false,” prosecutors wrote.

“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith’s team wrote, adding: “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”

Trump has pleaded not guilty to four criminal charges accusing him of a conspiracy to obstruct the congressional certification of the election, defraud the US out of accurate results and interfere with Americans’ voting rights.

Prosecutors working with Smith divulged their evidence to make the case that the remaining allegations against Trump survive the US supreme court’s ruling that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official actions taken as president.

Prosecutors have said the filing will discuss new evidence, including transcripts of witness interviews and grand jury testimony, but much of that material will not be made public until a trial.

Senior officials in Trump’s administration including the former vice-president Mike Pence and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows appeared before the grand jury during the investigation.

Prosecutors submitted the court filing on Thursday, but US district judge Tanya Chutkan had to approve proposed redactions before it was made public.

Trump’s lawyers opposed allowing Smith to issue a sweeping court filing laying out their evidence, arguing it would be inappropriate to do so weeks before the election. They have argued the entire case should be tossed out based on the supreme court’s ruling.

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the brief “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional” and repeated oft-stated allegations that Smith and Democrats were “hell-bent on weaponizing the justice department in an attempt to cling to power”.

“The release of the falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous debate performance is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine American Democracy and interfere in this election.”

The US presidential election is a neck-and-neck contest, with Harris establishing a slight but solid lead over Trump in most national voting surveys. The picture in the all-important swing states is more complex, however, as tight races in these key contests will decide the election.

If Trump wins the election, he is likely to direct the justice department to drop the charges.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting

Special counsel prosecutors intend to make Donald Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence and his efforts to recruit fake electors the centerpiece of his criminal prosecution against the former president, according to a sprawling legal brief that was partly unsealed on Wednesday.

The redacted brief, made public by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, shows prosecutors are relying extensively on Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to support the charge that Trump conspired to obstruct the January 6 certification of the election results.

And prosecutors used an equally voluminous portion of the 165-page brief to express their intent to use evidence of Trump trying to get officials in seven key swing states to reverse his defeat to support the charges that he conspired to disenfranchise American voters.

The brief’s principal mission was to convince Chutkan to allow the allegations and evidence buttressing the superseding indictment against Trump to proceed to trial, arguing that it complied with the US supreme court’s recent ruling that gave former presidents immunity for official acts.

As part of the ruling, the court ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could proceed to trial.

The brief was the first round of that process that could take months to resolve and involve hearings to decide what allegations should be kept. Chutkan has the power to decide how much of the indictment can be kept and what evidence can be presented by prosecutors as she makes her decision.

According to the redacted brief, prosecutors want to use Trump’s conversations with Pence in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack, interactions between Trump and Pence and other private actors, as well as interactions between White House aides and private actors.

The bottom line from prosecutors was that each of the episodes reflected Trump acting not as president but as a candidate for office, which meant the default presumption that conversations between Trump and Pence were official could be rebutted.

For instance, prosecutors argued that evidence of Trump using personal lawyers Rudy Giuliani or John Eastman to pressure Pence should be permitted, since using private actors to commit a crime would not be an official act of the presidency or infringe on the functioning of the executive branch.

At the White House on 4 January 2021, prosecutors wrote, Trump deliberately excluded his White House counsel from attending a meeting with Pence – meaning the only attorney in the room was Eastman.

“It is hard to imagine stronger evidence that the conduct is private than when the president excludes his White House counsel and only wishes to have his private counsel present,” the brief said.

And on a 5 January 2021 phone call, prosecutors wrote, Trump and Eastman were the only ones on the line to make a final effort to pressure Pence to drop his objections and agree not to count slates of electors for Joe Biden when he presided over the congressional certification the next day.

“For the defendant’s decision to include private actors in the conversation with Pence about his role at the certification makes even more clear that there is no danger to the executive branch’s functions and authority, because it had no bearing on any executive branch authority,” it said.

Prosecutors added that the conversations between Trump and Pence that they wanted to present at trial should be allowed because there was nothing official about them discussing electoral prospects as candidates for office.

Referencing previously undisclosed evidence, prosecutors showed that Pence at various points suggested that “the process was over” and that Trump consider running again in 2024 – key evidence that Trump was on notice from his own running mate that he had lost the election.

And prosecutors reiterated that charging the most damning evidence that Trump’s lawyers knew they were violating the law – emails where Eastman asked Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob to consider one more “minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act – did not impact the functioning of the executive branch.

The expansive brief also included prosecutors asking to take to trial evidence of Trump’s effort to pressure state officials to reverse the results and his effort to then rely on fake slates of electors.

The response from Trump’s lawyers is almost certain to be that Trump was calling state officials because he was executing the clause in the US constitution that the president has a duty to ensure the general election was run without interference or fraud.

But prosecutors included a pre-emptive rebuttal: “Although countless federal, state, and local races also were on the same ballots … the defendant focused only on his own race, the election for president, and only on allegations favoring him as a candidate in targeted states he had lost.”

Special counsel prosecutors intend to make Donald Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence and his efforts to recruit fake electors the centerpiece of his criminal prosecution against the former president, according to a sprawling legal brief that was partly unsealed on Wednesday.

The redacted brief, made public by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, shows prosecutors are relying extensively on Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to support the charge that Trump conspired to obstruct the January 6 certification of the election results.

And prosecutors used an equally voluminous portion of the 165-page brief to express their intent to use evidence of Trump trying to get officials in seven key swing states to reverse his defeat to support the charges that he conspired to disenfranchise American voters.

The brief’s principal mission was to convince Chutkan to allow the allegations and evidence buttressing the superseding indictment against Trump to proceed to trial, arguing that it complied with the US supreme court’s recent ruling that gave former presidents immunity for official acts.

As part of the ruling, the court ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could proceed to trial.

The brief was the first round of that process that could take months to resolve and involve hearings to decide what allegations should be kept. Chutkan has the power to decide how much of the indictment can be kept and what evidence can be presented by prosecutors as she makes her decision.

According to the redacted brief, prosecutors want to use Trump’s conversations with Pence in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack, interactions between Trump and Pence and other private actors, as well as interactions between White House aides and private actors.

The bottom line from prosecutors was that each of the episodes reflected Trump acting not as president but as a candidate for office, which meant the default presumption that conversations between Trump and Pence were official could be rebutted.

For instance, prosecutors argued that evidence of Trump using personal lawyers Rudy Giuliani or John Eastman to pressure Pence should be permitted, since using private actors to commit a crime would not be an official act of the presidency or infringe on the functioning of the executive branch.

At the White House on 4 January 2021, prosecutors wrote, Trump deliberately excluded his White House counsel from attending a meeting with Pence – meaning the only attorney in the room was Eastman.

“It is hard to imagine stronger evidence that the conduct is private than when the president excludes his White House counsel and only wishes to have his private counsel present,” the brief said.

And on a 5 January 2021 phone call, prosecutors wrote, Trump and Eastman were the only ones on the line to make a final effort to pressure Pence to drop his objections and agree not to count slates of electors for Joe Biden when he presided over the congressional certification the next day.

“For the defendant’s decision to include private actors in the conversation with Pence about his role at the certification makes even more clear that there is no danger to the executive branch’s functions and authority, because it had no bearing on any executive branch authority,” it said.

Prosecutors added that the conversations between Trump and Pence that they wanted to present at trial should be allowed because there was nothing official about them discussing electoral prospects as candidates for office.

Referencing previously undisclosed evidence, prosecutors showed that Pence at various points suggested that “the process was over” and that Trump consider running again in 2024 – key evidence that Trump was on notice from his own running mate that he had lost the election.

And prosecutors reiterated that charging the most damning evidence that Trump’s lawyers knew they were violating the law – emails where Eastman asked Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob to consider one more “minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act – did not impact the functioning of the executive branch.

The expansive brief also included prosecutors asking to take to trial evidence of Trump’s effort to pressure state officials to reverse the results and his effort to then rely on fake slates of electors.

The response from Trump’s lawyers is almost certain to be that Trump was calling state officials because he was executing the clause in the US constitution that the president has a duty to ensure the general election was run without interference or fraud.

But prosecutors included a pre-emptive rebuttal: “Although countless federal, state, and local races also were on the same ballots … the defendant focused only on his own race, the election for president, and only on allegations favoring him as a candidate in targeted states he had lost.”

Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.

“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.

“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.

“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”

Melania Trump has rarely expressed political views in public. The book, which reveals the former first lady to be so firmly out of step with most of her own party, Melania, will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Her decision to include a full-throated expression of support for abortion rights is remarkable not just given her proximity to a Republican candidate running on an anti-abortion platform, but also given the severe deterioration of women’s reproductive rights under Donald Trump and the GOP.

In 2022, in the supreme court case Dobbs v Jackson, three justices installed when Donald Trump was president voted to strike down Roe v Wade, the ruling which had protected federal abortion rights since 1973. Republican-run states have since instituted draconian abortion bans.

Donald Trump has tried to both take credit for the Dobbs decision – long the central aim of evangelical and conservative Catholic donors and voters – and avoid the fury it has stoked, saying abortion rights should be decided by the states.

But Democrats have scored a succession of election wins by campaigning on the issue, even in conservative states, and threats to reproductive rights, among them threats to fertility treatments including IVF, are proving problematic for Republicans up and down this year’s ticket.

Amid a blizzard of statements opponents deem misogynistic and regressive, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, has indicated he would support a national abortion ban – a move it seems his boss’s wife would be against.

Donald Trump himself recently got into a tangle over whether he would vote in November to protect abortion rights in Florida, a ballot his wife will also cast given their residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He eventually said he would vote no. Judging by her own words, Melania Trump appears likely to vote yes.

Her memoir is slim, long on descriptions of her youth in Slovenia, life as a model in New York and love for the man whose third wife she became, correspondingly short on policy discussion. But Donald Trump provides a blurb, praising his wife’s “commitment to excellence … insightful perspective … [and] entrepreneurial achievements”.

Before discussing abortion, Melania Trump says she disagreed with her husband on some aspects of immigration policy, not least as an immigrant herself.

“Occasional political disagreements between me and my husband,” she says, are “part of our relationship, but I believed in addressing them privately rather than publicly challenging him.”

And yet, later in her book, she states views on abortion and reproductive rights diametrically opposed to those of her husband and his party.

“I have always believed it is critical for people to take care of themselves first,” Melania Trump writes of her support for abortion rights. “It’s a very straightforward concept; in fact, we are all born with a set of fundamental rights, including the right to enjoy our lives. We are all entitled to maintain a gratifying and dignified existence.

“This common-sense approach applies to a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health.”

Melania Trump says her beliefs about abortion rights spring from “a core set of principles”, at the heart of which sits “individual liberty” and “personal freedom”, on which there is “no room for negotiation”.

After outlining her support on such grounds for abortion rights, she details “legitimate reasons for a woman to choose to have an abortion”, including danger to the life of the mother, rape or incest, often exceptions under state bans, and also “a congenital birth defect, plus severe medical conditions”.

Saying “timing matters”, Melania Trump also defends the right to abortion later in pregnancy.

She writes: “It is important to note that historically, most abortions conducted during the later stages of pregnancy were the result of severe fetal abnormalities that probably would have led to the death or stillbirth of the child. Perhaps even the death of the mother. These cases were extremely rare and typically occurred after several consultations between the woman and her doctor. As a community, we should embrace these common-sense standards. Again, timing matters.”

More than 90% of US abortions occur at or before 13 weeks of gestation, according to data from the CDC. Less than 1% of abortions take place at or after 21 weeks.

On the campaign trail, Republicans have blatantly mischaracterized Democrats’ positions on abortion. Last month, debating Kamala Harris, Donald Trump falsely said his Democratic opponent’s “vice-presidential pick … says that abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. [Tim Walz] also says: ‘Execution after birth’ – execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born – is OK.”

He was factchecked: it is not legal in any state to kill a baby after birth.

On the page, Melania Trump issues a distinctly un-Trumpian appeal for empathy.

“Many women opt for abortions due to personal medical concerns,” she writes. “These situations with significant moral implications weigh heavily on the woman and her family and deserve our empathy. Consider, for example, the complexity inherent in the decision of whether the mother should risk her own life to give birth.”

Recent reporting has highlighted cases of women who have died in states where abortion has been banned.

She goes on to appeal for compassion.

“When confronted with an unexpected pregnancy, young women frequently experience feelings of isolation and significant stress. I, like most Americans, am in favor of the requirement that juveniles obtain parental consent before undergoing an abortion. I realize this may not always be possible. Our next generation must be provided with knowledge, security, safety, and solace, and the cultural stigma associated with abortion must be lifted,” writes the former first lady.

Finally, Melania Trump offers an expression of solidarity with protesters for reproductive rights.

“The slogan ‘My Body, My Choice’ is typically associated with women activists and those who align with the pro-choice side of the debate,” she writes. “But if you really think about it, ‘My Body, My Choice’ applies to both sides – a woman’s right to make an independent decision involving her own body, including the right to choose life. Personal freedom.”

The revelation on Wednesday evening that Melania Trump’s forthcoming memoir includes a full-throated defense of abortion rights, an issue her husband Donald Trump has repeatedly flip-flopped on during his presidential campaign, left people on both sides of the issue less than impressed.

“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body,” Melania Trump wrote in her memoir. “I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”

Melania Trump also defended the right to abortion later on in pregnancy – a procedure that her husband has repeatedly demonized. (Less than 1% of abortions occur at or past 21 weeks of gestation.)

“Sadly for the women across America, Mrs. Trump’s husband firmly disagrees with her and is the reason that more than one in three American women live under a Trump abortion ban that threatens their health, their freedom and their lives,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in an email. “Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear: If he wins in November, he will ban abortion nationwide, punish women and restrict women’s access to reproductive health care.”

Melania Trump’s remarks also took anti-abortion activists by surprise.

“It’s hard to follow the logic of putting out the former First Lady’s book right before the election undercutting President Trump’s message to pro-life voters,” Kristan Hawkins, president of the powerful Students for Life of America, posted on Twitter/X on Wednesday night. “What a waste of momentum.”

Over the last several weeks, anti-abortion activists have grown increasingly fed up with the former president, who has struggled, alongside the rest of the Republican party, to redefine his messaging on abortion rights amid outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Earlier in his campaign, Trump bragged about appointing three of the US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe, branded himself the “most pro-life president ever”. After Kamala Harris became the presidential nominee, however, Trump has pledged that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights” as well as vowed not to sign a national abortion ban – just weeks after refusing to say that he would veto one.

Melania Trump’s comments may feel like a further insult to the anti-abortion voters who feel abandoned by Trump, said Republican campaign strategist Liz Mair, adding anti-abortion advocates run potent get-out-the-vote operations. Those advocates were key to Trump’s 2016 victory.

“This might be just another thing that piles on to make pro-lifers think: ‘I just can’t with this guy.’ A lot of them were single-issue voters anyway,” Mair said. “He’s not really giving them much of an incentive to show up and do anything to his benefit.”

When Tresa Undem, a pollster who has surveyed people about abortion for more than two decades, heard the comments, she immediately thought: “Wow”. Then she thought: “It’s a campaign move.”

However, Undem is not sure who, exactly, the move is for – especially given the Trumps’ sometimes frosty relationship in public. Melania Trump has rarely aired her political views and has largely vanished from Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.

The odds of Melania Trump’s comments comforting moderate or conservative voters who support abortion rights are “fairly slim”, Undem said.

“These strong feelings – they did not suddenly appear this year, right? So she clearly has had no influence on him when it comes to policy related to abortion,” Undem said. “I don’t think she’s ever been positioned, or voters ever think of her, as having any kind of policy position or weight or influence on Trump.”

Ukraine has said that its forces have withdrawn from the eastern city of Vuhledar, a defensive bastion that had resisted repeated Russian attacks since Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion.

The military command in Kyiv said its troops left late on Tuesday. They had retreated in order to preserve personnel and combat equipment, it said, adding that Russian combat units had attacked from three directions and were close to “encircling” the city.

The fall of Vuhledar is a boost for the Kremlin and comes as Russian troops advance across the eastern Donetsk oblast. In February they captured the city of Avdiivka, outside the regional capital of Donetsk, occupied in 2014.

Since then the Russian advance has swallowed up towns and villages and come to within six miles of the city of Pokrovsk, a logistics hub 80km (50 miles) north of Vuhledar. Defence experts think Ukraine may next have to retreat from other under-pressure urban settlements, including Toretsk and Selydove.

Russian Telegram channels published video of triumphant troops waving the Russian tricolour flag over shattered buildings in Vuhledar. In one clip, four soldiers stood inside a gutted highrise flat and placed a flag outside. “Everything will be Russia. Victory will be ours,” an officer declared.

The communist hammer and sickle was also raised. Vuhledar was originally built around a mine in the mid-1960s when it was within the Soviet Union. Before the war it had a population of about 14,000. It is now a sprawling ruin, with apartment buildings smashed apart and scarred.

Ukraine’s 72nd mechanised brigade had defended Vuhledar for more than two years. On Tuesday it said the Russians had suffered “numerous losses as a result of prolonged fighting” as it tried to storm the city, which sits on an elevated plain.

“In an effort to take control of the city at any cost, the enemy managed to direct reserves to carry out flanking attacks, which exhausted the defence of our units,” the brigade explained.

Russia claimed it had wiped out large numbers of fleeing Ukrainian soldiers. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), however, said the scale of casualties was unknown and added that more would have been killed or captured if Russia had managed to encircle them.

According to the ISW, the loss of Vuhledar will not fundamentally alter offensive operations because it is “not a particularly crucial logistics node”. Russian forces already controlled surrounding access roads, the institute said. They would now have to “manoeuvre” across open terrain in order to link up with units farther north.

The overall picture for Kyiv is grim. Russian forces are advancing in eastern Ukraine at their quickest rate for two years. A Ukrainian incursion in August into Russia’s Kursk region was launched to relieve pressure on its exhausted frontline troops. It prompted Moscow to divert some of its units – but these came from other parts of the battlefield, in the south and north-east.

Putin has said Russia’s chief political goal was to seize the whole of the Donbas region in south-eastern Ukraine. In September 2022, he claimed to have “annexed” four Ukrainian regions, including Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk. Moscow controls just under a fifth of Ukraine as a whole, including about 80% of the Donbas.

The war has largely been a story of grinding artillery and drone strikes along a heavily fortified front stretching for nearly 1,000km (620 miles) and involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Russia has increasingly been employing pincer tactics to trap and then constrict Ukrainian strongholds.

Speaking in September, the Ukrainian president, Voldymyr Zelenskyy, acknowledged the situation in the east was difficult. He said the Russians were using airdropped guided bombs to “destroy everything”. They “finished off” with artillery and then sent in infantry to capture Ukrainian positions, he said.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly argued that Kyiv needs long-range weapons to counter the Kremlin’s superior air power. So far, however, he has been unable to persuade the US president, Joe Biden, to allow the use of US-provided weapons such as Atacms (army tactical missile systems) to destroy aerodromes and other military targets deep within Russia.

During a trip to Washington and New York last week – which included a meeting with Biden, as well as with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump – Zelenskyy again called for restrictions to be lifted. The UK is supportive. But so far it has not managed to overcome White House fears of possible nuclear escalation with Russia.

In the US, Zelenskyy also outlined his vision for a “just peace”. His plan for ending the war featured economic assistance from the west and enhanced military support. Another element appears to involve a possible trade of territory controlled by Ukraine inside Russia’s Kursk province for Ukrainian land occupied by Russia.

After gaining Vuhledar, Russian bloggers said Russia could now try to push towards Velyka Novosilka, just over 30 km (20 miles) to the west in the neighbouring Zaporizhzhia province. Vuhledar sits close to a railway line going to Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014. Russian forces currently control 98.5% of the Luhansk region and 60% of the Donetsk region.

• A Russian guided bomb struck a five-storey apartment block in Kharkiv late on Wednesday, starting fires and injuring at least 10 people, local officials said. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the strike underscored the need for more help from Ukraine’s western backers. He pointed to Iran’s strike on Israel as an example of allies working together to shoot down incoming rockets and missiles. “Ukraine must receive the necessary, and most importantly, sufficient help from the world, from our partners … Every time in the Middle East, during criminal Iranian strikes, we see how the international coalition acts together.”

• Ukraine’s army said it had withdrawn from the eastern town of Vuhledar, handing Russia one of its most significant territorial advances in weeks. Luke Harding writes that Ukraine’s 72nd mechanised brigade had defended Vuhledar for more than two years. The military command in Kyiv said its troops left late on Tuesday to preserve personnel and combat equipment.

• According to the ISW, the loss of Vuhledar will not fundamentally alter offensive operations because it is “not a particularly crucial logistics node”. Russian forces would now have to manoeuvre across open terrain in order to link up with units farther north. But, Harding writes, the overall picture for Kyiv is grim, with Russian forces advancing in eastern Ukraine at their quickest rate for two years. Russian bloggers said Moscow’s forces could now try to push from Vuhledar towards Velyka Novosilka, just over 30km (20 miles) to the west in Zaporizhzhia province. Russian forces currently control 98.5% of the Luhansk region and 60% of the Donetsk region.

• In Kyiv, the head of the capital’s military administration said fragments from a downed Russian drone damaged an apartment building in one of the capital’s eastern districts. There was no indication of any casualties.

• Crowds of ultra-Orthodox Jews in their tens of thousands celebrated the Jewish new year in the Ukrainian city of Uman on Wednesday despite the difficulties for many of travelling from one theatre of conflict to another. Followers of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov gather every year in his honour in Uman where he was buried in 1810. This year’s Rosh Hashanah coincided with a sweeping ballistic missile attack on Israel by Iran, a potentially dangerous new phase in the war triggered by the Hamas-led assault on Israel in October 2023.

• Like thousands of other pilgrims, Rony Eli-Ya travelled from his home in Israel to Uman this week for Rosh Hashanah. With Iran having fired ballistic missiles at Israel, Eli-Ya said he was not sure how he would return to his home near Tel Aviv. “We feel war here, and there,” said Eli-Ya, who said he goes to Uman every year. A current Israeli soldier, who wished to remain anonymous, told AFP he was visiting on leave. “The commander gave me 72 hours to go to Ukraine for the celebration and to go back to fight,” he said. “This is a holy day for us.”

• Vladimir Putin has signed into law measures that allow defendants who are already on criminal trial to avoid prosecution if they join the military. The legislation also allows for sentences or proceedings to be entirely cancelled if the enlistee is discharged for age or health reasons. Putin in September called for the military to increase its troop strength by 180,000 and the government’s draft budget this week earmarked a record 32.5% of its spending for the military.

It was a truth known to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell back in 1968, but now scientists have caught up with them: there really ain’t nothing like the real thing.

A neurological study in the Netherlands has revealed that real works of art in a museum stimulate the brain in a way that is 10 times stronger than looking at a poster.

Commissioned by the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, home to Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, the independent study used eye-tracking technology and MRI scans to record the brain activity of volunteers looking at genuine artworks and reproductions.

Scientists found the 20 volunteers had a response that was 10 times stronger when looking at the former.

“A factor of 10 is an enormous difference, and this is what happens when you look at a reproduction compared to a real work,” said Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis, on Wednesday. “You become [mentally] richer when you see things, whether you are conscious of it or not, because you make connections in your brain.”

Gosselink said she had been convinced of the power of the real before the study but had wanted her hunch to be formally investigated. “We all feel the difference – but is it measurable, is it real?” she said she had asked her colleagues a year ago. “Now, today we can really say that it is true.”

Martin de Munnik, a co-founder of Neurensics research institute, which carried out the research with other neurological specialists, said that the study had had two elements.

The volunteers, aged between 21 and 65, were attached to an electroencephalogram (EEG) brain scanner and eye-tracking equipment and asked to look at five paintings in the museum, plus posters of them in the museum shop.

Researchers also looked at the effects of images of real works versus reproductions flashed on to volunteers’ goggles, inside a University of Amsterdam functional MRI scanning machine. “If you want to know what people think, it is better to measure it than to ask them,” he said. “The results were extraordinary.”

The real artworks evoked a strong positive response in the precuneus, part of the brain involved with consciousness, self-reflection and personal memories, researchers said. Gerrit van Honthorst’s The Violin Player gave a positive “approach” stimulus of 0.41 out of 1 in real life, for instance, but just 0.05 in poster form.

The research also analysed Girl with a Pearl Earring. The popular work attracted most overall attention and drew the eye in what researchers described as a “sustained attention loop” – a triangle between the girl’s highlighted eye, mouth and pearl earring.

Erik Scherder, a professor in clinical neuropsychology invited to comment on the results, said the study underlined the importance of culture, particularly when the rightwing government in the Netherlands was imposing public cuts. “It shows what it does for your brain when you see an artwork,” he said. “This is a rich environment that really makes a difference … particularly for children in the growth phase.”

One of two doctors charged in the investigation of the death of Matthew Perry pleaded guilty on Wednesday in a federal court in Los Angeles to conspiring to distribute the surgical anesthetic ketamine.

Dr Mark Chavez, 54, of San Diego, signed a plea agreement with prosecutors in August and is now the third person to plead guilty in the aftermath of the Friends star’s fatal overdose last year.

Prosecutors offered lesser charges to Chavez and two others in exchange for their cooperation as they go after two targets they deem more responsible for the overdose death: another doctor and an alleged dealer who they say was known as “ketamine queen” of Los Angeles.

Chavez is free on bond after turning over his passport and surrendering his medical license, among other conditions.

His lawyer, Matthew Binninger, said after Chavez’s first court appearance on 30 August that he was “incredibly remorseful” and is “trying to do everything in his power to right the wrong that happened here”.

Also working with federal prosecutors are Perry’s assistant, who admitted to helping him obtain and inject ketamine, and a Perry acquaintance, who admitted to acting as a drug messenger and middleman.

The three are helping prosecutors in their prosecution of Dr Salvador Plasencia, charged with illegally selling ketamine to Perry in the month before his death, and Jasveen Sangha, a woman who authorities say sold the actor the lethal dose of ketamine. Both have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

Chavez admitted in his plea agreement that he obtained ketamine from his former clinic and from a wholesale distributor where he submitted a fraudulent prescription.

After a guilty plea, he could get up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced.

Perry was found dead by his assistant on 28 October. The medical examiner ruled ketamine was the primary cause of death. The actor had been using the drug through his regular doctor in a legal but off-label treatment for depression that has become increasingly common.

Perry began seeking more ketamine than his doctor would give him, authorities say. About a month before the actor’s death, he found Plasencia, who in turn asked Chavez to obtain the drug for him.

“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Plasencia texted Chavez. The two met up the same day in Costa Mesa, halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, and exchanged at least four vials of ketamine.

After selling the drugs to Perry for $4,500, Plasencia asked Chavez if he could keep supplying them so they could become Perry’s “go-to”.

Perry struggled with addiction for years, dating back to his time on Friends, when he became one of the biggest stars of his generation as Chandler Bing. He starred alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 on the mega-hit sitcom on NBC.

One of two doctors charged in the investigation of the death of Matthew Perry pleaded guilty on Wednesday in a federal court in Los Angeles to conspiring to distribute the surgical anesthetic ketamine.

Dr Mark Chavez, 54, of San Diego, signed a plea agreement with prosecutors in August and is now the third person to plead guilty in the aftermath of the Friends star’s fatal overdose last year.

Prosecutors offered lesser charges to Chavez and two others in exchange for their cooperation as they go after two targets they deem more responsible for the overdose death: another doctor and an alleged dealer who they say was known as “ketamine queen” of Los Angeles.

Chavez is free on bond after turning over his passport and surrendering his medical license, among other conditions.

His lawyer, Matthew Binninger, said after Chavez’s first court appearance on 30 August that he was “incredibly remorseful” and is “trying to do everything in his power to right the wrong that happened here”.

Also working with federal prosecutors are Perry’s assistant, who admitted to helping him obtain and inject ketamine, and a Perry acquaintance, who admitted to acting as a drug messenger and middleman.

The three are helping prosecutors in their prosecution of Dr Salvador Plasencia, charged with illegally selling ketamine to Perry in the month before his death, and Jasveen Sangha, a woman who authorities say sold the actor the lethal dose of ketamine. Both have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

Chavez admitted in his plea agreement that he obtained ketamine from his former clinic and from a wholesale distributor where he submitted a fraudulent prescription.

After a guilty plea, he could get up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced.

Perry was found dead by his assistant on 28 October. The medical examiner ruled ketamine was the primary cause of death. The actor had been using the drug through his regular doctor in a legal but off-label treatment for depression that has become increasingly common.

Perry began seeking more ketamine than his doctor would give him, authorities say. About a month before the actor’s death, he found Plasencia, who in turn asked Chavez to obtain the drug for him.

“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Plasencia texted Chavez. The two met up the same day in Costa Mesa, halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, and exchanged at least four vials of ketamine.

After selling the drugs to Perry for $4,500, Plasencia asked Chavez if he could keep supplying them so they could become Perry’s “go-to”.

Perry struggled with addiction for years, dating back to his time on Friends, when he became one of the biggest stars of his generation as Chandler Bing. He starred alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 on the mega-hit sitcom on NBC.

Georgia’s president has refused to sign into law a bill aimed at severely curtailing LGBTQ+ rights, weeks after the controversial legislation was passed by the country’s parliament.

Last month Georgia’s parliament was heavily criticised after it approved the legislation, which sets out sweeping bans on same-sex marriages, adoptions by same-sex couples and curbs on gender-affirming treatments.

The law, which mirrors legislation adopted in neighbouring Russia, also seeks to outlaw Pride events and censor depictions of LGBTQ+ people in film and books.

On Wednesday, the office of the president, Salome Zourabichvili, said she had opted against advancing the legislation. “President Zourabichvili refused to sign the bill and returned to parliament without vetoing it,” her spokesperson told AFP. The bill is instead expected to be signed into law by the parliament’s speaker.

The legislation has fuelled tensions in the polarised country, where parliamentary elections are to be held at the end of the month. Analysts have described the ballot as a crucial test of whether Georgia, once one of the most pro-western former Soviet states, is drifting towards Russia.

Rights campaigners argue that the “family values” bill will further marginalise and potentially fuel violence against the country’s vulnerable LGBTQ+ community. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, attacked the vote, which opposition politicians boycotted. Borrell said on social media that the bill would “increase discrimination and stigmatisation”.

One day after the bill was passed in parliament, the well-known transgender actor and model Kesaria Abramidze, 37, was found stabbed to death in her apartment.

Campaigners cast her death as part of a rise in violence against LGBTQ+ people, dovetailing with the ruling Georgian Dream party’s hardening stance on gay rights.

“There is a direct correlation between the use of hate speech in politics and hate crimes,” the Social Justice Center, a Tbilisi-based human rights group, said in a statement reacting to the murder.

Last year hundreds of opponents of gay rights stormed an LGBTQ+ festival in Tbilisi, forcing the event to be cancelled, while in May tens of thousands joined members of the ruling party in a march, organised by the conservative Orthodox church, to promote “traditional family values”.

In recent years the country’s president has increasingly been at odds with Georgian Dream. Earlier this year Zourabichvili vetoed the “foreign influence” law, which obliged civil society organisations and media that receive more than 20% of their revenues from abroad to register as “serving the interests of a foreign power”.

Her veto was later overridden by parliament, where Georgian Dream dominates.

OpenAI has raised $6.6bn (£5bn) in a funding round that values the artificial intelligence business at $157bn, with chipmaker Nvidia and Japanese group SoftBank among its investors.

The San Francisco-based startup, responsible for the ChatGPT chatbot, did not give details of a reported restructuring that will transform it into a for-profit business. The funding round was led by Thrive Capital, a US venture capital fund, and other backers include MGX, an Abu Dhabi-backed investment firm.

OpenAI’s post-fundraising valuation puts it on a par with Uber, although it remains far below the $3tn level of its biggest backer of recent years, Microsoft, which also joined the fundraising.

Other investors included Nvidia, a dominant player in the market for the chips that train and operate AI models, and Softbank, which counts the UK chip designer Arm among its investments.

Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, highlighted ChatGPT’s popularity, with more than 250 million weekly active users.

“Every week, over 250 million people turn to ChatGPT regardless of the scale of the challenge – whether it’s communicating with someone who speaks another language or solving the toughest research problems. AI is already personalising learning, accelerating healthcare breakthroughs, and driving productivity. And this is just the start,” she said.

OpenAI, which is reportedly heading for a loss of $5bn this year, said the fundraising would allow it to “double down” on cutting-edge AI research and increase its “compute capacity” – one of the main cost factors in building and operating powerful AI models.

The startup did not give an update on a mooted corporate restructuring that could mean it sheds its non-profit status and become a fully for-profit entity. OpenAI is run by a non-profit board but has a for-profit subsidiary, in which Microsoft is the biggest backer, with returns to investors and employees capped. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, could also receive a stake in the restructured company, according to reports.

Last week, a former OpenAI employee, William Saunders, said he was concerned that the restructuring could encourage the AI startup to cut corners on safety.

OpenAI’s charter commits the company to building artificial general intelligence – which it describes as “systems that are generally smarter than humans” – that benefits “all of humanity”.

The BBC has cancelled an interview with Boris Johnson after presenter Laura Kuenssberg accidentally sent the former prime minister her briefing notes.

The presenter of the BBC’s flagship Sunday political interview show said she sent Johnson the notes “in a message meant for my team”.

Kuenssberg, who was the BBC’s political editor between 2015 and 2022, said it was “embarrassing and disappointing”, adding the error meant it was “not right for the interview to go ahead”.

Johnson, who was prime minister from 2019 to 2022, has an upcoming memoir, Unleashed, that will be published next week.

Kuenssberg previously investigated his government in Panorama – Partygate: Inside the Storm, and looked back at the recent Conservative years in a three-part BBC Two series, Laura Kuenssberg: State of Chaos.

In a post on X on Wednesday evening, Kuenssberg wrote: “While prepping to interview Boris Johnson tomorrow, by mistake I sent our briefing notes to him in a message meant for my team.

“That obviously means it’s not right for the interview to go ahead.

“It’s very frustrating, and there’s no point pretending it’s anything other than embarrassing and disappointing, as there are plenty of important questions to be asked.

“But red faces aside, honesty is the best policy. See you on Sunday.”

A BBC spokesperson was reported as saying the inadvertent move made Thursday’s interview “untenable” and that both the BBC and Johnson’s team had agreed to cancel the interview.

The interview was due to be broadcast on Thursday evening.

A spokesperson for Johnson declined to comment.

Forty-seven tigers, three lions and a panther have died in zoos in south Vietnam due to the H5N1 bird flu virus, state media reported.

The deaths occurred in August and September at the private My Quynh safari park in Long An province and the Vuon Xoai zoo in Dong Nai, near the capital Ho Chi Minh City, the official Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported on Wednesday.

According to test results from the National Centre for Animal Health Diagnosis, the animals died “because of H5N1 type A virus”, VNA said.

The zoos declined to comment when contacted by Agence France-Presse.

No zoo staff members in close contact with the animals had experienced respiratory symptoms, the VNA report added.

Education for Nature Vietnam, an NGO that focuses on wildlife conservation, said there were a total of 385 tigers living in captivity in Vietnam at the end of 2023.

About 310 are kept at 16 privately owned farms and zoos, while the rest are in state-owned facilities.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that since 2022, there have been increasing reports of deadly outbreaks among mammals caused by influenza viruses, including H5N1.

It also says H5N1 infections can range from mild to severe in humans, and in some cases can even be fatal.

Vietnam notified the WHO about a human fatality from the virus in March.

In 2004, dozens of tigers died from bird flu or were culled at the world’s largest breeding farm in Thailand.

A North Korean defector living in South Korea has been detained after ramming a stolen bus into a barricade on a bridge near the heavily militarised border, in a failed attempt to return to his isolated homeland.

The man – who fled to the South in 2011 – ignored warnings from soldiers to stop while attempting on Tuesday to drive through the Tongil Bridge in Paju, just south of the heavily fortified demilitarised zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas, according to media reports citing South Korean provincial police.

“He lives under difficult economic conditions as a construction worker and misses his family still in the North,” an investigator told Agence France-Presse, explaining the man’s reasons for the attempted crossing.

The police are considering charging the suspect, who is in his 30s, with theft and violating national security laws, the investigator added.

Crossings from the South to the North are rare, with defectors typically heading in the opposite direction, though many struggle to adapt to life in their democratic, capitalist neighbour.

More than 34,000 North Koreans have defected to the South since the 1950-53 Korean war, mostly after arduous, sometimes life-threatening journeys, usually via China, to escape poverty and oppression at home, according to Seoul’s unification ministry.

The ministry, which handles cross-border affairs and provides resettlement support for defectors, said in 2022 that about 30 defectors were confirmed to have returned to the North since 2012, but defectors and activists say there could be many more unreported cases.

In early 2022, a defector in his 30s made a rare, risky return to North Korea across the heavily fortified border after struggling to cope in the South, igniting fresh debate over how such escapers are treated in their new home country.

Relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points in years, with Pyongyang ramping up weapons tests and bombarding the South with balloons carrying rubbish, and Seoul suspending a military deal and resuming propaganda broadcasts in response.

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse