Ukraine

Speaking from Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine, where shelling has intensified in the last week, the UN's top aid official in the country issued an urgent appeal on Friday for guarantees from Russia and affiliated forces, to allow humanitarians to deliver “absolutely necessary” relief items across the contact line. 

The $3billion package—announced on the country's independence day—includes more than 300,000 artillery and mortar rounds.

The United States on Tuesday (23 August) urged its citizens to leave Ukraine, saying it believed Russia was preparing to target civilian and government infrastructure in the next few days as the war reaches the six-month mark.

The European Union will discuss launching a major training program for Ukrainian forces in neighboring countries, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on August 22.

Moscow has rejected a proposal by United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres to demilitarize the area around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are set to meet Thursday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv with an agenda expected to include a global food crisis, threats to a nuclear power plant, and finding a political solution to the war launched by Russia.

[…] Wary of frustration and concern among some countries that the war is consuming too much global attention nearly six months in with no prospect of the United Nations being able to end it, Western diplomats acknowledge they are limited in how they can significantly further target Russia beyond having meetings.

The first vessel transporting Ukrainian wheat grain to support humanitarian operations run by the World Food Programme (WFP) has left the port of Yuzhny, also known as Pivdennyi, the UN agency reported on Tuesday. 

Under the Black Sea Initiative so far, 12 vessels have been “authorized to depart the Ukrainian ports,” the acting UN coordinator for the grain deal told UN journalists in New York on Wednesday. 

After Russia invaded Ukraine last February, the European Union moved to block RT and Sputnik, two of the Kremlin’s top channels for spreading propaganda and misinformation about the war. Nearly six months later, the number of sites pushing that same content has exploded as Russia found ways to evade the ban.