Russia attacks Ukrainian port before Putin’s grain deal talks with Turkish president
Two people were hospitalized after a 3½-hour Russian drone barrage on a port in Ukraine’s Odesa region on Sunday, officials said.
The attack on the Reni seaport comes a day before Russian President Vladimir Putin is to meet with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to discuss the resumption of food shipments from Ukraine under a Black Sea grain agreement that Moscow broke from in July.
Russian forces fired 25 Iranian-made Shahed drones along the Danube River in the early hours of Sunday, 22 of which were shot down by air defenses, the Ukrainian air force said on the messaging app Telegram.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, described the assault as part of a Russian drive “to provoke a food crisis and hunger in the world.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that the attack was aimed at fuel storage facilities used to supply military equipment.
People at the Burning Man festival in Nevada were told to conserve food, water and fuel and to shelter in place after rain turned the desert to mud. More rain is on the way.
The long-awaited meeting between Putin and Erdogan is due to take place in Sochi, on Russia’s southwestern coast.
Turkish officials have confirmed that the leaders will discuss renewing the Black Sea grain initiative, which the Kremlin pulled out of six weeks ago.
The deal — brokered by the United Nations and Turkey in July 2022 — had allowed nearly 36 million tons of grain and other commodities to leave three Ukrainian ports safely despite Russia’s war.
However, Russia broke away from the agreement after claiming that a parallel deal promising to remove obstacles to Russian exports of food and fertilizer hadn’t been honored.
Moscow complained that restrictions on shipping and insurance hampered its agricultural trade, even though it has shipped record amounts of wheat since last year.
The Sochi summit follows talks between the two nations’ foreign ministers on Thursday, during which Russia issued a list of actions that the West would have to take in order for Ukraine’s Black Sea exports to resume.
Erdogan has indicated sympathy with Putin’s position. In July, he said that Putin had “certain expectations from Western countries” over the Black Sea deal and that it was “crucial for these countries to take action in this regard.”
Elsewhere in Ukraine, two people were killed and another two were wounded during Russian shelling Sunday of the village of Vuhledar in the Donetsk area.
Artillery fire hit eight settlements across the region, Ukraine’s national police wrote on Telegram.
Zelensky announced Sunday that Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov will be replaced this week with Rustem Umerov, a Crimean Tatar lawmaker.
“Oleksii Reznikov has gone through more than 550 days of full-scale war. I believe that the Ministry needs new approaches and other formats of interaction with both the military and society at large,” Zelensky said on his official Telegram account.
Umerov, 41, a politician with the opposition party Holos, has served as head of the State Property Fund of Ukraine since September 2022. He was involved in the exchange of prisoners of war, political prisoners, children and civilians, as well as the evacuation of civilians from occupied territories. Umerov was also part of the Ukrainian delegation in negotiations with Russia over the U.N.-backed grain deal.
Ukrainian prosecutors announced Sunday that they had opened a war crimes investigation into the death of a police officer killed by Russian shelling of the town of Seredyna-Buda on Saturday afternoon.
Two other police officers and one civilian were wounded during the attack, which hit Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region.
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