Europe
European firefighters join battle to stop French wildfires
Firefighters from across Europe started arriving in France on Friday to help battle several wildfires, including a giant blaze ravaging pine forests in the southwest of the country.
The firefighters’ brigade from the Gironde region said the spread of the forest fire was limited overnight due to little wind but conditions for containing the blaze remained “unfavorable” due to hot, dry weather.
Read: Wildfires spread, fish die off amid severe drought in Europe
The fire in the Gironde region and neighboring Landes has burned more than 74 square kilometers (29 square miles) since Tuesday and led to the evacuation of at least 10,000 people.
More than 360 firefighters and 100 specialized land vehicles were sent from Germany, Romania, Poland and Austria. They are joining over 1,000 French firefighters already on site. Greece sent two specialized Canadair aircraft.
Sweden deployed two two firefighting Air Tractor planes to to help battle separate wildfires in the Brittany region, in western France.
Wildfires spread, fish die off amid severe drought in Europe
Firefighters from across Europe struggled Thursday to contain a huge wildfire in France that has swept through a large swath of pine forest, while Germans and Poles faced a mass fish die-off in a river flowing between their countries.
Europe is suffering under a severe heat wave and drought that has produced tragic consequences for farmers and ecosystems already under threat from climate change and pollution.
The drought is causing a loss of agricultural products and other food at a time when supply shortages and Russia’s war against Ukraine have caused inflation to spike.
In France, which is enduring its worst drought on record, flames raged through pine forests overnight, illuminating the sky with an intense orange light in the Gironde region, which was already ravaged by flames last month, and in neighboring Landes. More than 68 square kilometers (26 square miles) have burned since Tuesday.
The French wildfires have already forced the evacuation of about 10,000 people and destroyed at least 16 houses.
Read: Wildfires in Germany, Czechia threatening tourist region
Along the Oder River, which flows from Czechia north into the Baltic Sea, volunteers have been collecting dead fish that have washed ashore in Poland and Germany.
Piotr Nieznanski, the conservation policy director at WWF Poland, said it appears that a toxic chemical was released into the water by an industry and the low water levels caused by the drought has made conditions far more dangerous for the fish.
“A tragic event is happening along the Oder River, an international river, and there is no transparent information about what is going on,” he said, calling on government authorities to investigate.
People living along the river have been warned not to swim in the water or even touch it.
Poland’s state water management body said the drought and high temperatures can cause even small amounts of pollution to lead to an ecological disaster but it has not identified the source of the pollution.
In northern Serbia, the dry bed of the Conopljankso reservoir is now littered with dead fish that were unable to survive the drought.
The water level along Germany’s Rhine River was at risk of falling so low that it could become difficult to transport goods — including critical energy items like coal and gasoline.
Over 200 major glaciers disappear in Italy due to changing climate: research
More than 200 major Alpine glaciers have disappeared in Italy since record-keeping began in 1895, Italy's environmental lobby group Legambiente said in a report released on Wednesday.
In its third "Caravan of the Glaciers" report, Legambiente said the latest findings verified "the dramatic regression of glaciers due to the climate crisis."
The group said Alpine temperatures are rising twice as quickly as temperatures are rising at sea level, and the ground snow has decreased every year since 2012.
The report was produced as a way to inform policymakers regarding policies of sustainable development, said the Legambiente. It was produced by Legambiente in partnership with the Italian Glaciological Committee.
The phenomenon is thought to have wide-ranging consequences. "The rapid retreat of glacial fronts not only leads to the loss of fascinating landscapes and biodiversity, but it also amounts to the disappearance of important fresh water reserves," the report said.
Read: Scientists explore Thwaites, Antarctica's 'doomsday' glacier
The lack of fresh water coming from glacial reserves is a major contributor to the drought gripping most of Italy and threatening to reduce agricultural output, especially in northern Italy, where water from glaciers is a key part of the area's ecosystem, noted the report.
Another key impact involves public safety, said the report. Last month, 11 hikers died when a melting glacier caused a powerful landslide of ice and snow on the Marmolada in Italy's Dolomite Mountains. Officials and experts attributed the tragedy to scorching temperatures.
Russia struggles to replenish its troops in Ukraine
The prisoners at the penal colony in St. Petersburg were expecting a visit by officials, thinking it would be some sort of inspection. Instead, men in uniform arrived and offered them amnesty — if they agreed to fight alongside the Russian army in Ukraine.
Over the following days, about a dozen or so left the prison, according to a woman whose boyfriend is serving a sentence there. Speaking on condition of anonymity because she feared reprisals, she said her boyfriend wasn't among the volunteers, although with years left on his sentence, he “couldn't not think about it.”
As Russia continues to suffer losses in its invasion of Ukraine, now nearing its sixth month, the Kremlin has refused to announce a full-blown mobilization — a move that could be very unpopular for President Vladimir Putin. That has led instead to a covert recruitment effort that includes using prisoners to make up the manpower shortage.
This also is happening amid reports that hundreds of Russian soldiers are refusing to fight and trying to quit the military.
“We’re seeing a huge outflow of people who want to leave the war zone — those who have been serving for a long time and those who have signed a contract just recently,” said Alexei Tabalov, a lawyer who runs the Conscript’s School legal aid group.
The group has seen an influx of requests from men who want to terminate their contracts, “and I personally get the impression that everyone who can is ready to run away,” Tabalov said in an interview with The Associated Press. "And the Defense Ministry is digging deep to find those it can persuade to serve.”
Although the Defense Ministry denies that any "mobilization activities” are taking place, authorities seem to be pulling out all the stops to bolster enlistment. Billboards and public transit ads in various regions proclaim, “This is The Job,” urging men to join the professional army. Authorities have set up mobile recruiting centers in some cities, including one at the site of a half marathon in Siberia in May.
Regional administrations are forming “volunteer battalions” that are promoted on state television. The business daily Kommersant counted at least 40 such entities in 20 regions, with officials promising volunteers monthly salaries ranging from the equivalent of $2,150 to nearly $5,500, plus bonuses.
The AP saw thousands of openings on job search websites for various military specialists.
The British military said this week that Russia had formed a major new ground force called the 3rd Army Corps from “volunteer battalions,” seeking men up to age 50 and requiring only a middle-school education, while offering “lucrative cash bonuses” once they are deployed to Ukraine.
But complaints also are surfacing in the media that some aren’t getting their promised payments, although those reports can't be independently verified.
In early August, Tabalov said he began receiving multiple requests for legal help from reservists who have been ordered to take part in a two-month training in areas near the border with Ukraine.
The recruitment of prisoners has been going on in recent weeks in as many as seven regions, said Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the Gulagu.net prisoner rights group, citing inmates and their relatives that his group had contacted.
It's not the first time that authorities have used such a tactic, with the Soviet Union employing “prisoner battalions” during World War II.
Nor is Russia alone. Early in the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised amnesty to military veterans behind bars if they volunteered to fight, although it remains unclear if anything came out of it.
In the current circumstances, Osechkin said, it isn't the Defense Ministry that's recruiting prisoners — instead, it was Russia’s shadowy private military force, the Wagner Group.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, an entrepreneur known as "Putin’s chef” because of his catering contracts with the Kremlin and reportedly Wagner's manager and financier, brushed aside reports that he personally visited prisons to recruit convicts, in a written statement released by his representatives this month. Prigozhin, in fact, denies he has any ties to Wagner, which reportedly has sent military contractors to places like Syria and sub-Saharan Africa.
Read:Ukraine says 9 Russian warplanes destroyed in Crimea blasts
According to Osechkin, prisoners with military or law enforcement experience were initially offered to go to Ukraine, but that later was extended to inmates with varying backgrounds. He estimated that as of late July, about 1,500 might have applied, lured by promises of big salaries and eventual pardons.
Now, he added, many of those volunteers — or their families — are contacting him and seeking to get out of their commitments, telling him: "I really don’t want to go.”
According to the woman whose boyfriend is serving his sentence at the penal colony in St. Petersburg, the offers to leave the prison are "a glimmer of hope” for freedom. But she said he told her that of 11 volunteers, eight died in Ukraine. She added that one of the volunteers expressed regret for his decision and doesn’t believe he will return alive.
Her account couldn't be independently verified, but was in line with multiple reports by independent Russian media and human rights groups.
According to those groups and military lawyers, some soldiers and law enforcement officers have refused deployment to Ukraine or are trying to return home after a few weeks or months of fighting.
Media reports about some troops refusing to fight in Ukraine started surfacing in the spring, but rights groups and lawyers only began talking about the number of refusals reaching the hundreds last month.
In mid-July, the Free Buryatia Foundation reported that about 150 men were able to terminate their contracts with the Defense Ministry and returned from Ukraine to Buryatia, a region in eastern Siberia that borders Mongolia.
Some of the servicemen are facing repercussions. Tabalov, the legal aid lawyer, said about 80 other soldiers who sought to nullify their contracts were detained in the Russian-controlled town of Bryanka in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, according to their relatives. Last week, he said that the Bryanka detention center was shut down because of the media attention.
But the parent of one officer who was detained after trying to get out of his contract told the AP this week that some are still being detained elsewhere in the region. The parent asked not to be identified out of safety concerns.
Tabalov said a serviceman can terminate his contract for a compelling reason — normally not difficult — although the decision is usually up to his commander. But he added: “In the conditions of hostilities, not a single commander would acknowledge anything like that, because where would they find people to fight?”
Alexandra Garmazhapova, head of the Free Buryatia Foundation, told the AP that soldiers and their relatives complain of commanders tearing up termination notices and threatening “refuseniks” with prosecution. As of late July, the foundation said it had received hundreds of requests from soldiers seeking to end their contracts.
“I’m getting messages every day,” Garmazhapova said.
Tabalov said some soldiers complain that they were deceived about where they were going and didn’t expect to end up in a war zone, while others are exhausted from fighting and unable to continue.
Rarely, if at all, did they appear motivated by antiwar convictions, the lawyer said.
Russia will continue to face problems with soldiers refusing to fight, military analyst Michael Kofman said, but one shouldn't underestimate Russia's ability to “muddle through ... with half-measures.”
“They’re going to have a lot of people who are quitting or have people who basically don’t want to deploy," said Kofman, director of the Virginia-based Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, on a recent podcast. "And they’ve employed a lot of measures to try to keep people in line. But ultimately, there’s not that much that they can do.”
Russian oil shipments to central Europe expected to resume
Oil shipments from Russia through a critical pipeline to several European countries should resume soon after a problem over payments for transit was resolved, Slovakia’s Economy Minister Richard Sulik said on Wednesday.
“I expect the oil shipments to resume in hours,” Sulik said.
Russian state pipeline operator Transneft said Tuesday it halted shipments through the southern branch of the Druzhba, or Friendship, pipeline, which runs through Ukraine to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. The northern leg of the Druzhba pipeline, which runs through Belarus to Poland and Germany, was unaffected, Transneft said.
Transneft cited complications due to European Union sanctions for its action on Aug. 4, saying its payment to the company’s Ukrainian counterpart was refused.
Read: India, China growing markets for shunned Russian oil
Sulik said the payments would be made Wednesday by Slovak refiner Slovnaft after both the Russian and Ukrainian sides agreed to the solution. Slovnaft is owned by Hungary’s MOL energy group.
MOL confirmed the money has been transferred.
Slovakia receives practically all its oil through the Druzhba pipeline. Sulik said the payment is worth some 9–10 million euros (up to $10.2 million).
He said his country would work on a long-term solution to the problem which he said was caused by the refusal of an unnamed bank in Western Europe to transfer the money due to the sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia for its war against Ukraine.
“I wouldn’t look for a political context behind it, there’s none,” Sulik said.
However, Simone Tagliapietra, an energy expert at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, said Russia has weaponized natural gas heading to Europe by claiming technical issues, and “this opens questions on whether it might now do the same with oil.”
Russia has blamed equipment repairs for its decision to slash flows through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany, whose government has called it a political move to sow uncertainty and push up prices amid the war in Ukraine.
EU leaders agreed in May to embargo most Russian oil imports by the end of the year as part of the bloc’s sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The embargo covers Russian oil brought in by sea, but allowed temporary Druzhba pipeline shipments to Hungary and certain other landlocked countries in central Europe, such as Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
“These countries are very dependent on Russian oil and as such they might face shortages in the short term should the interruption be lasting,” Tagliapietra said.
Some drivers in Hungary were anticipating that on Wednesday, prompting MOL to appeal to the public asking customers to reduce their petrol purchases.
“For now, I keep trying to keep my car’s tank topped up, so I don’t run out of fuel. And then we’ll see,” said Erzsebet Kovacs, a motorist.
Stranded whale out of French river, to be moved to saltwater
A beluga whale stranded for several days in the Seine River was successfully removed from the French waterway Wednesday in preparation for a transfer to a saltwater basin in Normandy in hopes of saving its life.
The dangerously thin marine mammal has no digestive activity for unknown reasons, conservation group Sea Shepherd France tweeted, saying veterinary exams were done after the beluga was hauled out of water after hours of preparation.
The group said the beluga was a male with no infectious diseases and that veterinarians would try to re-stimulate the marine mammal's digestion. Conservationists have tried unsuccessfully since Friday to feed fish to the beluga.
Photos posted by Sea Shepherd France show the white mammal lying on a big net that was used to get it out of a river lock.
A veterinary team was planning to transport the 4-meter-long (13-foot-long) whale to a coastal spot in the northeastern French port town of Ouistreham for “a period of care,” according to Lamya Essemlali, president of Sea Shepherd France.
Read: Tour boat in Mexico hits whale or whale shark, 6 injured
The delicate transport was to be made via a refrigerated truck for the approximately 160-kilometer (99-mile) trip.
Authorities were planning to keep the whale in its temporary saltwater home for two to three days of surveillance and treatment before being towed out to sea.
The lost beluga was first seen in France’s river, far from its Arctic habitat, last week. It weighs about 800 kilograms (1,764 pounds).
Authorities said that while the move carries its own mortality risk because of the stress on the animal, the whale couldn't survive much longer in the Seine’s freshwater habitat.
They remain hopeful it will survive after it responded to a cocktail of antibiotics and vitamins administered in the last few days and rubbed itself on the lock’s wall to remove patches that had appeared on its back.
Shift in war's front seen as grain leaves Ukraine; plant hit
Six more ships carrying agricultural cargo held up by the war in Ukraine received authorization Sunday to leave the country’s Black Sea coast as analysts warned that Russia was moving troops and equipment in the direction of the southern port cities to stave off a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Ukraine and Russia also accused each other of shelling Europe's largest nuclear power plant.
The loaded vessels were cleared to depart from Chornomorsk and Odesa, according to the Joint Coordination Center, which oversees an international deal intended to get some 20 million tons of grain out of Ukraine to feed millions going hungry in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia.
Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the United Nations signed the agreements last month to create a 111-nautical-mile sea corridor that would allow cargo ships to travel safely out of ports that Russia’s military had blockaded and through waters that Ukraine’s military had mined. Implementation of the deal, which is in effect for four months, has proceeded slowly since the first ship embarked on Aug. 1.
Four of the carriers cleared Sunday to leave Ukraine were transporting more than 219,000 tons of corn. The fifth was carrying more than 6,600 tons of sunflower oil and the sixth 11,000 tons of soya, the Joint Coordination Center said.
Three other cargo ships that left Friday passed their inspections and received clearance Sunday to pass through Turkey’s Bosporus Strait on the way to their final destinations, the Center said.
However, the vessel that left Ukraine last Monday with great fanfare as the first under the grain exports deal had its scheduled arrival in Lebanon delayed Sunday, according to a Lebanese Cabinet minister and the Ukraine Embassy. The cause of the delay was not immediately clear.
Ukrainian officials were initially skeptical of a grain export deal, citing suspicions that Moscow would try to exploit shipping activity to mass troops offshore or send long-range missiles from the Black Sea, as it has done multiple times during the war.
The agreements call for ships to leave Ukraine under military escort and to undergo inspections to make sure they carry only grain, fertilizer or food and not any other commodities. Inbound cargo vessels are checked to ensure they are not carrying weapons.
Read:Ukraine grain headed for Lebanon under wartime deal delayed
In a weekend analysis, Britain's Defense Ministry said the Russian invasion that started Feb. 24 “is about to enter a new phase” in which the fighting would shift to a roughly 350-kilometer (217-mile) front line extending from near the city of Zaporizhzhia to Russian-occupied Kherson.
That area includes the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station which came under fire late Saturday. Each side accused the other of the attack.
Ukraine’s nuclear power plant operator, Energoatom, said Russian shelling damaged three radiation monitors around the storage facility for spent nuclear fuels and that one worker was injured. Russian news agencies, citing the separatist-run administration of the plant, said Ukrainian forces fired those shells.
Russian forces have occupied the power station for months. Russian soldiers there took shelter in bunkers before Saturday’s attack, according to Energoatom.
Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, recently warned that the way the plant was being run and the fighting going on around it posed grave health and environmental threats.
For the last four months of the war, Russia has concentrated on capturing the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Moscow separatists have controlled some territory as self-proclaimed republics for eight years. Russian forces have made gradual headway in the region while launching missile and rocket attacks to curtail the movements of Ukrainian fighters elsewhere.
The Russians “are continuing to accumulate large quantities of military equipment” in a town across the Dnieper River from Russian-held Kherson, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank. Citing local Ukrainian officials, it said the preparations appeared designed to defend logistics routes to the city and establish defensive positions on the river’s left bank.
Kherson came under Russian control early in the war and Ukrainian officials have vowed to retake it. It is just 227 kilometers (141 miles) from Odesa, home to Ukraine’s biggest port, so the conflict escalating there could have repercussions for the international grain deal.
The city of Mykolaiv, a shipbuilding center that Russian forces bombard daily, is even closer to Odesa. The Mykolaiv region’s governor, Vitaliy Kim, said an industrial facility on the regional capital’s outskirts came under fire early Sunday.
Over the past day, five civilians were killed by Russian and separatist firing on cities in the Donetsk region, the part of Donbas still under Ukrainian control, the regional governor, Serhiy Haidai, reported.
He and Ukrainian government officials have repeatedly urged civilians to evacuate.
Ukraine grain headed for Lebanon under wartime deal delayed
The scheduled arrival Sunday of the first grain ship to leave Ukraine and cross the Black Sea under a wartime deal has been delayed, a Lebanese Cabinet minister and the Ukraine Embassy said.
The cause of the delay was not immediately clear and Marine Traffic, which monitors vessel traffic and the locations of ships at sea, showed the Sierra Leone-flagged Razoni at anchor in the Mediterranean Sea near Turkey.
Lebanon’s transportation minister, Ali Hamie, tweeted the ship “that was supposed, according to what was rumored, to reach Tripoli port in Lebanon” changed its status. Hamie refused to comment further when contacted by The Associated Press.
The ship left Odesa last Monday carrying Ukrainian corn and later passed inspection in Turkey. It was supposed to arrive in the northern port of Tripoli at about 10 a.m. Sunday. According to Marine Traffic, the ship Saturday changed its status to “order” meaning the ship was waiting for someone to buy the corn.
The Ukrainian embassy in Beirut said the arrival of the ship has been postponed adding that an “update for the ceremony will be sent later when we get information about exact day and time of the arrival of the ship.”
Read:Shift in war's front seen as grain leaves Ukraine; plant hit
The shipment that was supposed to arrive in Lebanon comes at a time when the tiny Mediterranean nation is suffering from a food security crisis, with soaring food inflation, wheat shortages and bread lines. The ship is carrying some 26,000 tons of corn for chicken feed.
The passage of the vessel was the first under a breakthrough deal brokered by Turkey and the United Nations with Russia and Ukraine. The four sides signed deals last month to create safe Black Sea shipping corridors to export Ukraine’s desperately needed agricultural products as Russia’s war upon its neighbor grinds on.
Lebanon’s worst economic crisis in its modern history that began in late 2019 has left three-quarters of its population living in poverty while the Lebanese pound has lost more than 90% of its value.
The economic meltdown rooted in decades of corruption and mismanagement was made worse by a massive blast in August 2020 that destroyed Beirut’s port and the country’s main grain silos inside the sprawling facility. Large parts of the silos collapsed in recent days after fire caused by remnants of grain that started fermenting and ignited in the summer heat last month.
Lebanese officials said last week that the Razoni was supposed to leave Ukraine and head to Lebanon on Feb. 24 but the departure was delayed by the war that broke out days later.
On Friday, three more ships carrying thousands of tons of corn left Ukrainian ports and traveled through mined waters toward inspection of their delayed cargo, a sign that the international deal to export grain held up since Russia invaded Ukraine was slowly progressing.
Four more ships carrying agricultural cargo held up by the war in Ukraine received authorization Sunday to leave the country’s Black Sea ports.
Ukraine grain shipments offer hope, not fix to food crisis
A ship bringing corn to Lebanon’s northern port of Tripoli normally would not cause a stir. But it's getting attention because of where it came from: Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa.
The Razoni, loaded with more than 26,000 tons of corn for chicken feed, is emerging from the edges of a Russian war that has threatened food supplies in countries like Lebanon, which has the world's highest rate of food inflation — a staggering 122% — and depends on the Black Sea region for nearly all of its wheat.
The fighting has trapped 20 million tons of grains inside Ukraine, and the Razoni's departure Monday marked a first major step toward extracting those food supplies and getting them to farms and bakeries to feed millions of impoverished people who are going hungry in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia.
“Actually seeing the shipment move is a big deal,” said Jonathan Haines, senior analyst at data and analytics firm Gro Intelligence. “This 26,000 tons in the scale of the 20 million tons that are locked up is nothing, absolutely nothing ... but if we start seeing this, every shipment that goes is going to increase confidence.”
The small scale means the initial shipments leaving the world's breadbasket will not draw down food prices or ease a global food crisis anytime soon. Plus, most of the trapped grain is for animal feed, not for people to eat, experts say. That will extend the war's ripple effects for the world’s most vulnerable people thousands of miles away in countries like Somalia and Afghanistan, where hunger could soon turn to famine and where inflation has pushed the cost of food and energy out of reach for many.
To farmers in Lebanon, the shipment expected this weekend is a sign that grains might become more available again, even if at a higher price, said Ibrahim Tarchichi, head of the Bekaa Farmers Association.
But he said it won’t make a dent in his country, where years of endemic corruption and political divides have upended life. Since 2019, the economy has contracted by at least 58%, with the currency depreciating so severely that nearly three-quarters of the population now lives in poverty.
“I think the crisis will continue as long as operating costs continue to soar and purchasing power falls,” Tarchichi said.
The strife was on sharp display this week when a section of Beirut’s massive port grain silos collapsed in a huge cloud of dust, two years after an explosion killed more than 200 people and wounded thousands more.
While symbolic, the shipments have done little to ease market concerns. Drought and high fertilizer costs have kept grain prices more than 50% higher than early 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic. And while Ukraine is a top supplier of wheat, barley, corn and sunflower oil to developing countries, it represents just 10% of the international wheat trade.
There’s also little to suggest that the world’s poorest who rely on Ukrainian wheat distributed through U.N. agencies like the World Food Program will be able to access them anytime soon. Before the war, half of the grain the WFP purchased for distribution came from Ukraine.
The Razoni's safe passage was guaranteed by a four-month-long deal that the U.N. and Turkey brokered with Ukraine and Russia two weeks ago. The grain corridor through the Black Sea is 111 nautical miles long and 3 nautical miles wide, with waters strewn with drifting explosive mines, slowing the work.
Read: 3 more ships with grain depart Ukraine ports under UN deal
Three more ships departed Friday, heading to Turkey, Ireland and the United Kingdom. All the ships that have departed so far had been stuck there since the war began nearly six months ago.
Under the deal, some — not all — of the food exported will go to countries experiencing food insecurity. That means it could take weeks for people in Africa to see grain from the new shipments and even longer to see the effects on high food prices, said Shaun Ferris, a Kenya-based adviser on agriculture and markets for Catholic Relief Services, a partner in World Food Program distributions.
In East Africa, thousands of people have died as Somalia and neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya face the worst drought in four decades. Survivors have described burying their children as they fled to camps where little assistance could be found.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Somalia and other African countries turned to non-traditional grain partners like India, Turkey and Brazil, but at higher prices. Prices of critical foods could start to go down in two or three months as markets for imported food adjust and local harvests progress, Ferris said.
Who is first in line for the grain from Ukraine could be affected by humanitarian needs but also comes down to existing business arrangements and commercial interests, including who is willing to pay the most, Ferris said.
“Ukraine is not a charity,” he said. “It will be looking to get the best deals on the market” to maintain its own fragile economy.
The WFP said this week that it’s planning to buy, load and ship 30,000 tons of wheat out of Ukraine on a U.N.-chartered vessel. It did not say where the vessel would go or when that voyage might happen.
In Lebanon, where humanitarian aid group Mercy Corps says the price of wheat flour has risen by more than 200% since the start of Russia’s war, people stood in long, often tense lines outside bakeries for subsidized bread in recent days.
The government green-lit a $150 million World Bank loan to import wheat, a temporary solution of six to nine months before it could be forced to lift subsidies on bread altogether.
While the situation is hard for millions of Lebanese, the country’s roughly 1 million Syrian refugees who fled a civil war across the border face stigmatization and discrimination trying to buy bread.
A Syrian living in northern Lebanon said it often takes him three to four visits to bakeries before he finds someone willing to sell him bread, with priority given to Lebanese. He described lines of 100 people waiting and only a handful being allowed in every half-hour to buy a small bundle of loaves.
“We get all sorts of rude comments because we’re Syrian, which we usually just ignore, but sometimes it gets too much and we decide to go home empty-handed,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Bus crash on highway in Croatia kills at least 12 people
A Poland-registered bus carrying pilgrims to a shrine in Bosnia skidded from a highway in northern Croatia early Saturday, killing at least 12 people and injuring several others, police and officials said.
Croatian police said on Twitter that “in the skidding of a bus with Polish license plates, according to initial information from the field, 11 people died and several were injured." Officials said one more passenger died later in a hospital and that the bus was carrying 43 people.
Croatia’s state HRT television reported that about 30 people were injured, many seriously. It said the most likely cause of the crash was the driver falling asleep.
The broadcaster showed video of a smashed blue bus in a ditch next to the highway. The bus was traveling in the direction of Zagreb, Croatia's capital.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the bus was taking pilgrims to the Catholic shrine in Medjugorje, a town in southern Bosnia. The shrine is Europe’s third-most popular pilgrimage destination after Lourdes and Fatima, although the Vatican has not verified any of the reported miracles that witnesses claimed to have seen there.
“This morning, I spoke about the details of the tragedy with Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, who assured the full support of Croatian medical services," Morawiecki said on Facebook. "I recommended our consular services to organize a support organization for the families of accident participants."
Also read: Blaze kills firefighter’s 10 relatives, 3 of them children
Croatian Interior Minister Davor Bozinic said the bus originated from “a place near Warsaw" and that “according to some information," it was carrying pilgrims to Medjugorje.
The accident happened at 5:40 a.m. local time (3:40 a.m. GMT) some 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Zagreb, on the A-4 highway, which is busy during the peak of the tourist season.
Rescue teams were sent to the location of the accident that an investigation what caused the accident was ongoing, Croatian media reported.
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