Ukraine

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.

Months of diplomacy have yielded a set of agreements allowing Ukraine to export grain via the Black Sea. In this Q&A, Crisis Group experts assess gains from the accord, which could be significant even if it does not by itself push down global food prices.

During their visit to Kyiv, the OSCE Chairman-in-Office and Poland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Zbigniew Rau, and OSCE Secretary General, Helga Maria Schmid have announced a new OSCE support programme for Ukraine. … The new support programme sets out the implementation of approximately 25 projects. 

UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said, if both parties agreed, the UN was ready to send experts to the frontline town of Olenivka where the incident occurred on July 29.