US pledges more military aid to Ukraine, peace seems far off

KYIV:

The United States promised more military support for Ukraine, including drones, and is doing preliminary work on whether to send fighter aircraft, as fighting raged on in the east, with the war about to enter its sixth month.

Moscow and Kyiv signed a landmark deal on Friday to unblock grain exports from Black Sea ports. However, representatives declined to sit at the same table and avoided shaking hands at the agreement ceremony in Istanbul, reflecting wider enmity.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hailed Friday's agreement as unlocking around $10 billion worth of grain exports, needed to ease a food crisis.

But on the war, Zelenskiy said there could be no ceasefire unless lost territory was retaken.

"Freezing the conflict with the Russian Federation means a pause that gives the Russian Federation a break for rest," he told the Wall Street Journal.

"Society believes that all the territories must be liberated first, and then we can negotiate about what to do and how we could live in the centuries ahead."

There have been no breakthroughs on the front lines since Russian forces seized the last two Ukrainian-held cities in the eastern province of Luhansk in late June and early July.

Russian forces failed to establish control over Ukraine's second-biggest power plant at Vuhlehirska, northeast of Donetsk, and troops tried to advance west from the city of Lysychansk but were pushed back, the Ukrainian armed forces' general staff said.

In the southern town of Nikopol on the Dnipro river, continued Russian shelling killed at least one person, a Ukrainian official said on his Telegram channel.

"A 60-year-old woman died," said Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the military administration of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine.

The Russian attack on Nikopol in the south, target of more than 250 rockets in the past week, damaged 11 homes and farm buildings, cut off gas and water pipes, and destroyed a railway track, he added.

Up river in the Dnipropetrovsk region, rockets targeted a town and nearby villages, the region's governor, Valentyn Reznychenko, said on Saturday.

In the northeastern, "several powerful strikes" hit the centre of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, on Saturday morning, Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote in a post on Telegram.

Russia's defence ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment by Reuters outside regular hours.

Kyiv hopes that its gradually increasing supply of Western arms, such as U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), will allow it to recapture territory.

Russia's defence ministry said on Friday its forces had destroyed four HIMARS systems between July 5 and Wednesday, refuted by the United States and Ukraine.

Ukraine's mayor of Russian-occupied city Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, reported that two explosions were heard in the early hours of Saturday at the Azov Sea resort Kyrylivka, where he said Russia had moved material to avoid becoming targets for HIMARS.

"They hoped that neither our HIMARS nor the Armed Forces and the resistance movement would get them there. But someone definitely got them," Fedorov said from territory still in Ukrainian hands.

Reuters could not verify the battlefield reports.

The White House on Friday announced $270 million in fresh support for Kyiv, saying it was doing preliminary work on whether to send fighter aircraft, although such a move would not happen in the near term.

The Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine has caused Europe's biggest conflict since 1945, forcing millions to flee and turning entire cities to rubble. The Kremlin says it is engaged in a "special military operation" to demilitarise and "denazify" Ukraine. Kyiv and its allies say the war is an unprovoked act of aggression.

GRAIN DEAL

Friday's deal to allow certain exports to be shipped from Black Sea ports seeks to avert famine among tens of millions of people in poorer nations by delivering more wheat, sunflower oil, fertiliser and other products to world markets, including for humanitarian needs.

A blockade of Ukrainian ports by Russia's Black Sea fleet, trapping tens of millions of tonnes of grain and stranding many ships, has worsened global supply chain bottlenecks and, along with Western sanctions, stoked food and energy price inflation.

Moscow has denied responsibility for the crisis, blaming sanctions for slowing its own food and fertiliser exports and Ukraine for mining the approaches to its Black Sea ports.

A United Nations official said a separate pact signed on Friday would smooth such Russian exports and that the U.N. welcomed U.S. and European Union clarifications that their sanctions would not apply to their shipment.

"Today, there is a beacon on the Black Sea. A beacon of hope... possibility... and relief in a world that needs it more than ever," said U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

Russia's RIA news agency reported that Lithuania has lifted a ban on the rail transport of sanctioned goods into and out of the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, an enclave sandwiched between Poland and the Baltic state, cut off from the rest of Russia.

Lithuania had imposed the ban in June, triggering an outcry from Moscow and a promise of swift retaliation.