UN chief meets Zelenskiy with focus on grain exports, N-plant

Bloomberg

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres met Thursday in Lviv, in western Ukraine, with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Zelenskiy had discussions with each before tripartite talks started.
Among the topics in Zelenskiy’s talks with Guterres was the situation at the Zaporizhizhia nuclear power plant, occupied by Russian forces since March and recently subject to shelling that Kyiv and Moscow blame on each other.
Commenting on Telegram after speaking with Antonio Guterres, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he discussed with the UN Secretary-General António Guterres the forced deportation of Ukrainians, the need to release Ukrainian soldiers and medics from Russian captivity, and continued exports of grain from the Black Sea.
“Particular attention was paid to the topic of Russia’s nuclear blackmail” at the Zaporizhzhia plant, Zelenskiy said, adding that the UN “must ensure the security of this strategic object, its demilitarization and complete liberation from Russian troops.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a key architect of the Ukrainian grain export safe-transit agreement, met with Zelenskiy before the three men started tripartite talks.
Shipments from Black Sea ports are picking up under deal brokered by Turkey and the UN, driving grain prices lower.
More than 500,000 tons of foodstuffs has been exported from Ukraine aboard 21 ships since a safe-transit deal for three ports in the Odesa region was signed last month.
More vessels are arriving by the day. A key challenge is whether larger vessels normally commonplace in Ukraine’s ports are willing to transit the corridor and boost flows, even as Moscow continues its wider assault.
Wheat futures in Chicago tumbled on Thursday and have now erased all of the year’s gains. Also, Russia’s defense ministry said it deployed fighter jets equipped with hypersonic missiles to the exclave of Kaliningrad. Two are suspected of having violated Finnish airspace.
Three MiG-31 planes with hypersonic Kinzhal missiles relocated to the Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave as part of strategic deterrence, Russian Defense Ministry says, according to Interfax.
The deployments have been signaled by Moscow for some time in response to Finland and Sweden’s decision to join Nato.
Two of the jets are suspected of having violated Finnish airspace near Porvoo on the Gulf of Finland, Finland’s defense ministry said, according to Reuters.
Russian forces conducted several unsuccessful assaults near Kramatorsk, Bakhmut and Avdiyivka in the eastern Donetsk region, Ukraine’s military staff reported on Facebook. Shelling continued in areas from the Sumy region in the northeastern Ukraine to Mykolaiv region in the south, according to the statement. Russia also fired missiles at Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv, killing at least 9 people and wounding 35 as residential house and a dormitory were hit, Oleh Syniehubov, the regional governor said. One person was killed and two injured in Mykolaiv.
Meanwhile, new pledges of support for Ukraine from international donors declined “drastically” to about 1.5 billion euros ($1.52 billion) last month, with two thirds, or 1 billion euros, of the total coming from Norway, according to the latest analysis by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
“In July, donor countries initiated almost no new aid, but they did deliver some of the already committed support such as weapon systems,” said Christoph Trebesch, who heads the team that compiles the institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker.