UN chief to meet leaders of Turkiye, Ukraine

KYIV－United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will meet with the leaders of Ukraine and Turkiye later this week, officials announced on Tuesday, as the first shipment of grain to leave Ukraine under a UN-brokered deal appears to have ended up in Syria.

The deal brokered by the UN and Turkiye last month has allowed a tentative restart of grain exports from Ukraine after the conflict blocked essential global supplies.

Guterres will hold talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Thursday.

The discussion includes "the need for a political solution to this conflict", UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

Guterres will then visit the Ukrainian port city of Odessa on Friday－one of three ports being used in the deal to export grain－before heading to Turkiye.

The arrival of the cargo ship Razoni in Syria, carrying the first shipment of grain from Ukraine, comes after the government in Kyiv praised the ship's initial departure from the port of Odessa as a sign that Ukraine could safely ship out its barley, corn, sunflower oil and wheat to a hungry world, where global food prices have spiked in part due to the conflict.

Images from Planet Labs PBC analyzed by The Associated Press showed the Sierra Leone-flagged Razoni at the port just before 11 am on Monday. The vessel was just next to the port's grain silos, key to supplying wheat to the nation.

Grain efforts

Data from the Razoni's Automatic Identification System tracker showed it had been turned off since Friday, when it was just off the coast of Cyprus, according to the ship-tracking website MarineTraffic. Ships are supposed to keep their AIS trackers on, but vessels wanting to hide their movements often turn theirs off. Those heading to Syrian ports routinely do so.

The Razoni, loaded with 26,000 metric tons of corn, left Odessa on Aug 1. But Lebanon, which was Razoni's presumed destination, ended up not taking the shipment.

As diplomatic efforts to end the conflict continue, Ukraine's nuclear agency Energoatom reported a major cyberattack on its website, but said its operations had not been disrupted.

Energoatom said on Telegram that it is "the most powerful cyberattack" since the conflict began.

Also on Tuesday, Russia said explosions at a military facility in Crimea that damaged power infrastructure were the result of "sabotage".

Fire erupted at a military site where ammunition was being stored and black smoke billowed into the air, images on social media showed.

"As a result of an act of sabotage, a military storage facility near the village of Dzhankoi was damaged," the defense ministry was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying.

Agencies - Xinhua