AFP

Russia and Ukraine on Wednesday held their first direct negotiations since March in a bid to break an impasse over grain exports that has seen food prices soar and millions face hunger.

The high-stakes meeting involving UN and Turkish officials in Istanbul broke up after slightly more than three hours without the participants speaking to the press.

But a UN spokesman said the global body’s Secretary-General Antonio Guterres would soon brief reporters about “positive” movement at the talks.

“We believe that this is something positive and (Guterres) will talk to you at some length about why that is,” UN spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters in New York.

The stakes could not be higher for tens of millions of people facing the threat of starvation in African and other poor nations because of the battles engulfing one of the world’s main grain-producing regions.

Ukraine is a vital exporter of wheat and grains such as barley and maize. It has also supplied nearly half of all the sunflower oil traded on global markets.

But shipments across the Black Sea have been blocked by Russian warships and mines Kyiv has laid to avert a feared amphibious assault.

– Russian proposals –

The Istanbul negotiations are being complicated by growing suspicions that Russia is trying to export grain it has stolen from Ukrainian farmers in regions under its control.

Russian authorities in Ukraine’s southern region of Kherson on Wednesday countered with accusations that Kyiv’s forces were deliberately burning crops and mining fields.

US space agency data released last week showed 22 percent of Ukraine’s farmland falling under Russian control since the February 24 invasion.

The two sides entered the talks saying that a deal was close but some contentious issues remained.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Kyiv was “two steps from an agreement with Russia”.

Russian defence ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Moscow had “submitted a package of proposals for the speediest practical solution” to the crisis.

Russia said on Tuesday its requirements included the right to “search the ships to avoid the contraband of weapons” — a demand rejected by Kyiv.

– Grain corridors –

NATO member Turkey has been using its good relations with both the Kremlin and Kyiv to try and broker an agreement on a safe way to deliver the grain.

Turkey says it has 20 merchant ships waiting in the region that could be quickly loaded and sent to world markets.

A plan by the UN proposes the ships follow safe “corridors” that run between the known location of mines.

Kyiv has also asked that its vessels be accompanied by warships from a friendly country such as Turkey.

Experts say de-mining the Black Sea is a complex operation that could take months — too long to address the growing global food crisis.

Kuleba said he did not think Moscow actually wanted to reach an agreement because proceeds from grain sales would help support a Western-backed government in Kyiv that the Kremlin brands as “Nazis”.

“They know that if we start to export, we will get proceeds from world markets, and this will make us stronger,” Kuleba said.

– ‘Operational pause’ –

The talks in Istanbul precede a meeting in Tehran next Tuesday between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

Erdogan’s ultimate goal is to bring Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky down to Istanbul for talks aimed at pausing the fighting and launching formal peace talks.

But the Ukrainian army warned this week that Russia was preparing to stage its heaviest attack yet on the Donetsk region — the larger of the two areas comprising the Donbas war zone.

Ukrainian officials said at least five people died in Russian shelling on the region surrounding the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv.

Emergency services recovering bodies from a destroyed residential building in the Donetsk town of Chasiv Yar said the death toll from a missile strike on Sunday rose to 48, making it one of the deadliest incidents in the war.

“You never get used to war. It’s dreadful and scary,” 60-year-old Lyubov Mozhayeva said in the partially destroyed frontline city of Bakhmut.

The Russian army has not conducted any major ground offensives since taking the last points of Ukrainian resistance in the war zone’s smaller Lugansk region at the start of the month.

Analysts believe the Russians are taking an “operational pause” during which they are rearming and regrouping forces before launching an assault on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk — Ukraine’s administrative centre for the east.

Ukraine is trying to counter the Russians by staging increasingly potent attacks with new US and European rocket systems targeting arms depots.

US officials believe the Russians are trying to recoup their losses by negotiating to acquire hundreds of combat drones from Iran.

Survivors of recent mass shootings in America and relatives of people killed in them pleaded with lawmakers Wednesday to ban the powerful assault weapons used in those massacres.

“I want you to picture my face, my husband’s face, as we read our daughter’s death certificate,” said a tearful Kimberly Rubio, whose daughter Lexi was killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on May 24. 

A total of 19 children and two teachers died in the attack in Texas by a young gunman armed with a military-style semiautomatic rifle.  

Rubio was one of a group of people touched forever by such violence who gathered outside the US Capitol on Wednesday.

“There is one question that should be on the forefront of their minds,” Rubio said of US lawmakers. “What if the gunman never had access to an assault weapon?”

A video released Tuesday shows the gunman walking calmly into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde before he heads to two classrooms and starts shooting. It shows how police milled around in hallways for more than an hour until they finally moved in and killed the gunman. 

The video has infuriated the parents of kids who were killed in the massacre.

“Our country has a problem, a big problem,” said Abby Brosio, who survived a mass shooting in Highland Park outside Chicago on July 4.

That time a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle and shooting from a rooftop on an Independence Day parade killed seven people and wounded more than 30.

In 1994 Congress passed a 10-year ban on assault rifles and certain high-capacity magazines. But lawmakers let it expire in 2004 without renewing the ban and sales of those weapons have soared since then.

After the Uvalde shooting, President Joe Biden appealed to lawmakers to again ban assault rifles or at least raise the minimum age for buying them from 18 to 21.

But Republican lawmakers, who see such a restriction as going against the constitutional right to bear arms, refused to go along with Biden’s proposal.

US President Joe Biden on Wednesday kicked off a Middle East tour in Israel where both sides vowed to deepen the Jewish state’s integration in the region as they face their common foe Iran.

Biden — whose first regional visit since taking office will also bring him to Saudi Arabia — pledged strong backing for Israel, which has forged ties with several Arab states in recent years and hopes to do so with Riyadh as well.

“We’ll continue to advance Israel’s integration into the region,” Biden said after Air Force One touched down at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv to a red-carpet welcome, while underscoring Washington’s “bone deep” connection to the Jewish state. 

“I’m proud to say that our relationship with the state of Israel is deeper and stronger in my view than it’s ever been. With this visit, we’re strengthening our connections even further,” the president said. 

Israel’s caretaker prime minister Yair Lapid said that “we will discuss building a new security and economy architecture with the nations of the Middle East”, following US-brokered accords in 2020 with the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco.

“And we will discuss the need to renew a strong global coalition that will stop the Iranian nuclear programme,” he added, amid ongoing efforts by world powers to salvage Iran’s frayed 2015 nuclear deal.

Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia on Friday will be the major focus of the tour, after he branded the oil-rich kingdom a “pariah” over the 2018 murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The trip is seen as part of efforts to stabilise oil markets rattled by the war in Ukraine, through a re-engagement with a long-time key US strategic ally and major energy supplier.

Air Force One will make a first direct flight from Israel to Saudi Arabia amid efforts to build ties between the Jewish state and the conservative Gulf kingdom, which does not recognise Israel’s existence.

– Palestinian anger –

After Biden landed, Israel’s military showed him its new Iron Beam defence system, an anti-drone laser it claims is crucial to countering Iran’s fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Israel insists it will do whatever is necessary to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and remains staunchly opposed to a restoration of the 2015 deal that gave Tehran sanctions relief.

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi warned earlier Wednesday that if Biden’s goal on the trip was to bolster Israel’s security, his “efforts will not create security for the Zionists in any way”. 

After the Israeli military showcase, the US presidential motorcade headed to Jerusalem, where Biden visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, meeting with survivors of the Nazi genocide and inscribing a note that read: “We must never, ever, forget, because hate is never defeated.”

Israel has raised 1,000 flags across Jerusalem to welcome the US leader, who has not reversed former president Donald Trump’s controversial decision to recognise the city as the capital of the Jewish state.

Biden, 79, will also meet Palestinian leaders angered by what they describe as Washington’s failure to curb Israeli aggression.

The persistent frustrations of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy are nothing new for Biden, who first visited the region in 1973 after being elected to the Senate.

Palestinians claim Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem as their capital and, ahead of the visit, accused Biden of failing to make good on his pledge to restore the United States as an honest broker in the conflict.

– ‘Two-state solution’ –

“We only hear empty words and no results,” said Jibril Rajoub, a leader of the secular Fatah movement of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

In remarks to Israeli officials at the airport, Biden emphasised his continued backing for Palestinian statehood. 

“A two-state solution,” he said, remains “the best way to ensure” a prosperous future “for Israelis and Palestinians alike”.

But there are no expectations of a new US peace push, with Israel still mired in political gridlock ahead of a November 1 election, the fifth in less than four years.

US-Palestinian ties have been strained by the May killing of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh while she was covering an Israeli army raid in the West Bank.

The United Nations has concluded the Palestinian-American journalist was killed by Israeli fire. Washington has agreed this was likely, but also said there was no evidence the killing was intentional.

Abu Akleh’s niece Lina told AFP Wednesday that the family remains “outraged” over Washington’s struggles to push for Israeli accountability. 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is travelling with Biden, on Wednesday invited Abu Akleh’s relatives for talks in Washington, but Lina Abu Akleh told AFP the family’s request to meet American officials in Jerusalem had not yet been answered.  

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US inflation surged to a fresh peak of 9.1 percent in June, further squeezing American families and heaping pressure on President Joe Biden, whose approval ratings have taken a battering from the relentless rise in prices. 

Government data released Wednesday showed a sharp, faster-than-expected increase in the consumer price index compared to May driven by significant increases in gasoline prices.

The 9.1 percent CPI spike over the past 12 months to June was the fastest increase since November 1981, the Labor Department reported.

Energy contributed half of the monthly increase, as gasoline jumped 11.2 percent last month and a staggering 59.9 percent over the past year. Overall energy prices posted their biggest annual increase since April 1980.

While acknowledging the inflation rate was “unacceptably high,” Biden argued that it was “out of date” as it did not reflect a clear drop in energy prices since mid-June.

The recent price drop had provided “important breathing room for American families. And, other commodities like wheat have fallen sharply since this report,” the president said in a statement.

Insisting that tackling inflation was the top priority, Biden admitted his administration needed “to make more progress, more quickly, in getting price increases under control.”

The war in Ukraine has pushed global energy and food prices higher, and US gas prices at the pump last month hit a record of more than $5 a gallon. 

However, energy prices have eased in recent weeks, with oil prices falling below $100 a barrel for the first time since April, which could start to relieve some of the pressure on consumers.

But the Federal Reserve is likely to continue its aggressive interest rate increases as it tries to tamp down the price surge by cooling demand before inflation becomes entrenched.

The US central bank last month implemented the biggest rate hike in nearly 30 years, and economists say another three-quarter-point increase is likely later this month.

Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics summed up the data in one word: “Ouch.” 

“This report will make for very uncomfortable reading at the Fed,” he said. “It rules out the chance of the Fed hiking by only 50bp this month.”

– Signs of cooling? –

Driven by record-high gasoline prices, the consumer price index jumped 1.3 percent in June compared to May.

But Shepherdson noted some signs of cooling prices in the data and predicted “this will be the last big increase.”

When volatile food and energy prices are stripped out of the calculation, “core” CPI increased 5.9 percent over the past year — still a rapid pace but slowing from the pace in May, according to the data. 

Food and housing prices also rose in June, as did car prices, though the rate has stabilized or slowed from the past month, the report said.

The White House came out ahead of the report to predict it would show “highly elevated” inflation due to rising gasoline prices that have since retreated. 

According to AAA, the national average price at the pump was down to $4.63 a gallon, from $5.01 a month ago.

Mickey Levy of Berenberg Capital Markets said the “broadening” of price increases to more categories is a “cause for concern” for the Fed’s efforts, but “there is reason to believe price increases may moderate in the near term.”

Even so, the big jump left Biden open to intense criticism from opposition Republicans, who blamed Democrats’ spending.

Even Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia accused leaders in Washington of ignoring the inflation risk.

“No matter what spending aspirations some in Congress may have, it is clear to anyone who visits a grocery store or a gas station that we cannot add any more fuel to this inflation fire,” Manchin said in a statement.

Shares of Delta Air Lines tumbled Wednesday as swelling costs pressured quarterly earnings, despite persistently robust demand that so far appears resilient amid inflation. 

The big US carrier reported solid second-quarter operating earnings and said it is on track for “meaningful full year profitability,” a markedly better outlook after the bruising pandemic downturn.

But the results missed analyst expectations, prompting analyst questions about when Delta expects to get costs under control and stabilize operations.

Besides a 41 percent jump in fuel costs compared with the 2019 period, the airline saw increases in labor costs, in part because of elevated overtime pay as it contends with an industry-wide labor crunch that will take time to address.

“The issues we’re facing are temporary,” said Chief Executive Ed Bastian, alluding to a six-week stretch in the just-finished quarter plagued by flight cancellations and delays.

Bastian said operational performance had improved in July after the carrier built in more buffer time for crews between flights 

Delta has also trimmed its plans for near-term growth. It projects third-quarter capacity will be down 15 to 17 percent compared with the 2019 level.

Executives said cost pressures should ease in the second half of the year as Delta puts off growth plans and focuses on improving operations. 

Part of the issue is the onboarding of some 18,000 new staff members since the pandemic. 

Bastian said the carrier had done a good job of hiring people, but that there is a learning curve with new employees that should abate as staff gets experience.

Profits for the quarter were $735 million on $13.8 billion in revenues. That translated into $1.44 per share, below the $1.64 expected by analysts.

Delta’s earnings were released shortly before the June US consumer price index report, which showed a 9.1 percent jump over the last 12 years. Inflation will pinch household disposable income, especially for the less wealthy.

Delta executives insisted they were seeing no erosion in ticket purchases, citing “pent-up demand” after the pandemic.

“We’re not seeing it,” Delta President Glen Hauenstein said of a potential decline. “As of now, we’re enjoying very robust spend.”

Shares fell 6.6 percent to $29.02 in late-morning trading.