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ROME (AP) — Iran’s foreign minister insists that his country opposes Russia’s war against Ukraine but stayed vague Wednesday about whether Tehran’s military cooperation with Moscow would include sales of drones that could carry missiles.

Earlier in the war, Iran was criticized in the West for not condemning Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of neighboring Ukraine. But Wednesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica, Foreign Minister Hossein-Amir Abdollahian was quoted as saying that “we are against Russia’s military attack in Ukraine.”

Abdollahian arrived in Rome on Monday for a visit including meetings with Italian business officials and industrialists, as well as with the Italian foreign minister and Vatican officials.

The Iranian foreign minister was vague when asked about U.S. contentions that Russia is about to acquire Iranian drones that could transport missiles.

“We have various types of collaboration with Russia, including in the defense sector,” Abdollahian replied. “But we won’t help either of the sides involved in this war because we believe that it (the war) needs to be stopped.”

He went on to slam Western countries, saying their arms manufacturers want to sell weapons, adding: “We will avoid any action that could lead to an escalation, but we will work to stop the war.”

Nuclear talks with Iran have been at a standstill for months. Abdollahian in the interview contended that the negotiators have made progress on a draft agreement but that ” there are other questions to be faced.”

Pressed to elaborate, the minister replied: “We are asking for a strong economic guarantee. If a Western business signs a contract with its Iranian counterpart, it must have the certainty that its project will be realized and will be able to receive compensation.” The comment apparently referring to business deals affected by sanctions against Tehran.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, reported last month that Iran has 43 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity — a short step to 90%. Nonproliferation experts warn that’s enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon if Iran chose to pursue it.

However, Iran still would need to design a bomb and a delivery system for it, which could likely need months. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Tehran’s escalating nuclear work has raised alarms, and transparency is rapidly diminishing over its nuclear program. Last month Iran shut off more than two dozen IAEA monitoring cameras from nuclear-related sites across the country.

Asked about the cameras, Abdollahian denied that the Iranians shut them off, saying instead “we took them off the circuit” and insisting they were voluntarily installed.

“In whatever moment that the negotiations reach some result, we will bring back the 27 video cameras installed by IAEA inside our sites,” the minister said.

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BERLIN (AP) — The German government unveiled a new package of climate measures Wednesday to close the emissions gap in the transport and housing sectors as part of the country’s plan to become carbon neutral by 2045.

Transport Minister Volker Wissing said his department planned to boost the installation of electric vehicle charging stations, expand public transport and build more bicycle lanes in the hopes that people will leave their gasoline-powered cars at home.

But Wissing, a member of the pro-business Free Democratic Party, said Germany would not be introducing a general highway speed limit that environmental activists have said would immediately cut emissions and lower the sky-high cost of fuel by reducing demand.

“As transport minister I need to weigh up the goal of protecting the climate as quickly as possible on the one hand, and other other hand keep in mind the mobility needs and acceptance (of measures) in society,” said Wissing.

Together with existing measures, the goal of limiting transport sector emissions to 85 million metric tons of CO2 — from 148 million tons last year — could be achieved, he said.

Greenpeace called the plans “nebulous” and said a general speed limit would achieve concrete emissions cuts. It also criticized that new gas furnaces can continue to be installed until 2024, arguing that the measure should be in effect immediately so that homeowners switch to less polluting heat pumps.

Currently, many stretches of the Autobahn have no speed limit and it is not uncommon for drivers to push their cars to go faster than 200 kilometers per hour (124 mph), greatly increasing fuel use.

Limiting speeds on German highways to 100 kph (62 mph), 80 kph (50 mph) on country roads and 30 kph (19 mph) in town would save up to 9.2 million tons of CO2 a year, the environmental group DUH said.

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Follow all AP stories on climate change issues at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.

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By Tom Balmforth and Pavel Polityuk

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine said on Tuesday it had carried out a long-range rocket strike against Russian forces and military equipment in southern Ukraine, territory it says it is planning to retake in a counter-offensive using hundreds of thousands of troops.

The strike hit an ammunition dump in the town of Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region and killed 52 people, Ukraine’s military said. It came after Washington supplied Ukraine with advanced HIMARS mobile artillery systems which Kyiv says its forces are using with growing efficiency.

The town’s Russia-installed authorities gave a different version of events. The Russian TASS news agencies reported they said that at least seven people had been killed in the attack and around 70 injured. A Russian-backed official in Kherson said at least seven people had been killed and that civilians and civilian infrastructure had been hit.

Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield accounts.

The area Ukraine struck is one that Russia seized after launching on Feb. 24 what Moscow called “a special military operation” in its fellow ex-Soviet neighbour and is of strategic importance with Black Sea access, a once thriving agricultural industry and a location just north of Russian-annexed Crimea.

Ukrainian government officials have spoken of efforts to marshal up to a million troops and of their aim to recapture southern parts of the country now under Russian control.

“Based on the results of our rocket and artillery units, the enemy lost 5️2 (people), an Msta-B howitzer, a mortar and seven armoured and other vehicles, as well as an ammunition depot in Nova Kakhovka,” Ukraine’s southern military command said in statement.

Unverified videos posted on social media showed smoke and sparks, followed by an immense fireball erupting into the night sky. Images released by Russian state media showed a wasteland covered in rubble and the remains of buildings.

An official from the Russian-backed local administration said that Ukraine had used HIMARS missiles and that they had destroyed warehouses containing saltpetre, a chemical compound which can be used to make fertilizer or gunpowder. A large explosion resulted. Russia’s TASS news agency reported later that the fires were extinguished.

The Ukrainian Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the kind of weapon used.

“There are still many people under the rubble. The injured are being taken to the hospital, but many people are blocked in their apartments and houses,” Vladimir Leontyev, head of the Russia-installed Kakhovka District military-civilian administration, was quoted by TASS as saying. He said that warehouses, shops, a pharmacy, gas stations and a church had been hit.

COUNTER-ATTACK PLANS

The conflict has blocked access to Ukraine’s grain and cooking oils, exacerbating a global food crisis. More than 20 million tonnes of grain are stuck in silos at the key Black Sea port of Odesa.

Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said military delegations from Ukraine, Russia and Turkey would meet U.N. officials in Istanbul on Wednesday to discuss a possible deal to resume safe exports of Ukrainian grain.

“We are working hard indeed but there is still a way to go,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters.

As Russia blockades Ukraine’s main Black Sea ports, Ukraine Deputy Infrastructure Minister Yuriy Vaskov said grain shipments via the Danube River had increased with the reopening of the Bystre canal, which provides access to small inland river ports.

Ukraine expects monthly grain exports to rise by 500,000 tonnes as a result, Vaskov said. Ukraine is also negotiating with Romania and the European Commission about increasing shipments through the Sulina canal, he said.

Russia has accused Ukraine of shelling its own people in territory where it has lost control. Ukraine says it evacuates as many people as possible from areas seized by Russian forces in what it and the West have cast as an attempted imperial-style land grab by Moscow.

Kyiv and the West say Russia’s own strikes have been indiscriminate, killing civilians and levelling city districts.

Moscow denies targeting civilians but many Ukrainian population centres have been left in ruins as Europe’s biggest conflict since World War Two grinds towards the five-month mark.

The U.N. human rights office said on Tuesday that 5,024 civilians had been killed in Ukraine since the invasion began, adding that the real toll was likely much higher.

Russia has tried to introduce the rouble in Kherson and is offering Russian passports to locals. Russian-installed officials say they also plan to hold a referendum on the region becoming part of Russia but have not yet set a date.

Ukraine is itself bracing for what it expects will be a massive new Russian offensive in the east where Moscow says it is determined to take control of all of the industrial Donbas region.

Russian forces, which earlier this month completed the capture of Luhansk province in the Donbas, have for weeks been shelling parts of neighbouring Donetsk province.

Regional Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said there was a significant buildup of Russian troops, particularly in the Bakhmut and Siversky areas, and around Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

The entire front line in the region was under constant shelling as Russian troops tried to break through but were being repelled, he said.

(Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Andrew Osborn, Nick Macfie and Cynthia Osterman; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky, Mark Heinrich and Aurora Ellis)

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Dozens of people have died in four days of gang battles in a violent neighborhood of Haiti’s capital, the latest eruption of bloodshed in a wave of increasing violence sweeping the country, local officials said Tuesday.

Jean Hislain Frederick, deputy mayor in Cite Soleil district of Port-au-Prince, said that the fighting erupted Friday in a clash between members of rival gangs and that at least 50 people had died and more than 50 were wounded.

The violence began just a day after the first anniversary of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Since Moïse was killed, violence has soared in Haiti as gangs battle over territory, and the government has struggled to crack down.

The aid group Doctors Without Borders said that thousands of people were trapped in Cite Soleil without drinking water, food and medical care.

The organization called on other humanitarian groups for help and it urged the gangs “to spare civilians.” In a press release, it said three of its members were treating wounded people in an area of Cite Soleil called Brooklyn.

“Along the only road into Brooklyn, we have encountered corpses that are decomposing or being burned,” Mumuza Muhindo, Doctors Without Borders head of mission in Haiti, said in the statement. “They could be people killed during the clashes or people trying to leave who were shot — it is a real battlefield. It is not possible to estimate how many people have been killed.”

Local officials said the fighting involved the rival gangs known as G9 and G-Pep.

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico City police engaged in a shootout Tuesday with more than a dozen gunmen armed with a .50 caliber sniper rifle, grenades and a machine gun, authorities said.

City police chief Omar Garcia Harfuch wrote in his social media accounts that officers were wounded.

He said that 14 suspects had been detained and that officers freed two kidnap victims who were apparently being held against their will.

The shootout took place in Topilejo, a town on the city’s rural, southern edge. The mountains on the city’s southern rim have long been used by kidnap gangs and other criminals for hideouts.

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LONDON (AP) — A BBC investigation alleged Tuesday that British special forces killed dozens of detainees in suspicious circumstances during counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan a decade ago.

Citing newly obtained military documents, the broadcaster alleged that one SAS unit may have unlawfully killed 54 people in the southern Helmand province in 2010 to 2011. It also alleged that the former head of U.K. special forces knew about the alleged killings, but didn’t pass on the evidence to a murder inquiry.

The Ministry of Defense said the report “jumps to unjustified conclusions from allegations that have already been fully investigated.”

The ministry said two independent investigations have looked into the conduct of British forces in Afghanistan and that neither found sufficient evidence to prosecute.

“Insinuating otherwise is irresponsible, incorrect and puts our brave Armed Forces personnel at risk both in the field and reputationally,” it said in a statement.

“The Ministry of Defense of course stands open to considering any new evidence, there would be no obstruction,” it added.

British forces were deployed to Afghanistan since 2001 as part of a NATO-led international coalition after the Sept. 11 attacks. Thousands of British troops were sent to Helmand from 2006 to help with providing security for reconstruction projects, but they were soon drawn into combat operations.

The BBC investigation focused on one six-month deployment by an SAS squadron that operated in Helmand from late 2010. It said the unit carried out “kill or capture” raids to detain Taliban commanders and disrupt bomb-making networks.

The investigation reported that intelligence flaws meant innocent civilians were sometimes caught up in the operations.

Citing operational reports detailing the special forces’ accounts of night raids, the BBC said it found “a pattern” of similar reports of Afghan men being shot dead because they pulled out weapons after they were detained.

Officials were concerned that more people were killed than weapons were reportedly recovered during some raids — suggesting the SAS soldiers were shooting unarmed people, the report said.

The report said internal emails showed that senior officials were concerned but failed to report the suspicions to military police.

Opposition lawmaker John Healey described the allegations as “deeply disturbing,” and urged Defense Secretary Ben Wallace to explain to Parliament what action he would take to verify the claims.

The last U.K. forces and their NATO allies withdrew from Afghanistan last summer, nearly 20 years after the first Western soldiers were deployed there.

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NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — A 500-year-old Orthodox icon that was looted from a church in the breakaway north of ethnically divided Cyprus has been returned to the island.

The icon of the Enthroned Christ, which Cyprus’ Antiquities Department dates to around the end of the 15th century to the early 16th century, was presented at a ceremony Tuesday to the head of the island’s Orthodox Church, Archbishop Chrysostomos.

The icon belongs to the 12th-century Christ Antiphonitis Church, which is near the northern coastal town of Kyrenia. It was one of countless icons, frescoes, mosaics and religious artifacts stolen from churches that were abandoned when a 1974 Turkish invasion split the island between primarily Orthodox Greek Cypriots in the south and Muslim Turkish Cypriots in the north.

Turkey’s invasion had followed a coup mounted by supporters of union with Greece.

“Efforts to repatriate stolen artifacts are continuing,” said Transport Minister Yiannis Karousos, who presented the icon to the church.

The Cyprus Church traced the icon to an auction in Switzerland, and Swiss police seized it in 2014. Following a long legal process, Swiss authorities handed the icon over last week and it was flown to Cyprus.

The Cyprus Church has for decades been trying to track down numerous religious artifacts stolen from hundreds of abandoned churches and monasteries in the north and sold abroad.

The church said the returned icon would be held by the archbishopric “until it returns to its rightful place” in the Antiphonitis Church.

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By Cassandra Garrison

VALLE NUEVO, Mexico (Reuters) – The largest tropical forest in North America yields to perfect rows of corn and soy. Light-haired women with blue eyes in wide-brimmed hats bump down a dirt road in a horse and buggy, past simple brick homes and a whitewashed schoolhouse: A Mennonite community in southern Mexico.

Here, in the state of Campeche on the Yucatan Peninsula at the northern edge of the Maya Forest, the Mennonites say they live to traditional pacifist values and that expanding farms to provide a simple life for their families is the will of God.

In the eyes of ecologists and now the Mexican government, which once welcomed their agricultural prowess, the Mennonites’ farms are an environmental disaster rapidly razing the jungle, one of the continent’s biggest carbon sinks and a home to endangered jaguars.

Smaller only than the Amazon, the Maya Forest is shrinking annually by an area the size of Dallas, according to Global Forest Watch, a non-profit organisation that monitors deforestation.

The government of President Andres Manuel Lopez is now pressuring the Mennonites to shift to more sustainable practices, but despite a deal between some Mennonite settlements and the government, ongoing land clearance was visible in two villages visited by Reuters in February and May.

Farmers such as Isaak Dyck Thiessen, a leader in the Mennonite settlement of Chavi, are finding it hard to adjust.

“Our people just want to be left in peace,” he said, standing on a shaded doorstep to escape the unforgiving afternoon sun. Beyond his neat farm rose the green wall of the rainforest.

In search of land and isolation, Mennonites – for whom agricultural toil is a core tenet of their Christian faith – grew in numbers and expanded into remote parts of Mexico after first arriving from Canada in the early 20th Century.

Despite shunning electricity and other modern amenities away from work, their farming has evolved to include bulldozers and chainsaws as well as tractors and harvesters.

In Campeche, where Mennonites arrived in the 1980s, around 8,000 sq km of forest, nearly a fifth of the state’s tree cover, has been lost in the last 20 years, with 2020 the worst on record, according to Global Forest Watch.

Groups including palm oil farmers and cattle ranchers also engage in widespread land clearance. Data on how much deforestation is driven by Mennonite settlers and how much by other groups is not readily available.

One 2017 study, led by Mexico’s Universidad Veracruzana, found that property owned by Mennonites in Campeche had rates of deforestation four times higher than non-Mennonite properties.

The clearance contrasts with the traditions of indigenous farmers who have rotated corn and harvested forest products such as honey and natural rubber since Maya cities dominated the jungle from the Yucatan to El Salvador.

Itself under international pressure to pursue a greener agenda, in August the government persuaded some Campeche Mennonite settlements to sign an agreement to stop deforesting land.

Not all the communities signed up.

FIRE AND SAWS

On the edge of the remote village of Valle Nuevo, Reuters journalists witnessed farmers clearing jungle and setting fires to prepare for planting.

Jacob Harder, Jr., a Mennonite school teacher in Valle Nuevo, said the agreement had not made an impact on how Valle Nuevo approaches agriculture.

“We haven’t changed anything,” Harder said.

Leader Dyck Thiessen and a lawyer representing some communities and farmers said Mennonites, who take a pacifist approach to conflict, felt attacked and scapegoated by the government’s efforts.

Jose Uriel Reyna Tecua, the lawyer, said they were unfairly blamed while the government pays less attention to others that deforest.

At one meeting last year, Agustin Avila, a senior official at the federal environment ministry, warned villagers the military could be brought to the area to prevent deforestation if the communities did not change their ways, Reyna Tecua said.

“That was the direct threat,” Reyna Tecua said.

In response to a Reuters question about Avila’s alleged comments, the environment ministry denied any mention of using the military, saying the government operated on the basis of dialogue.

Carlos Tucuch, head of the Campeche office of Mexico’s National Forestry Commission (CONAFOR), told Reuters the government was not singling out the Mennonites and was also tackling other causes of deforestation.

THE MOVE SOUTH

Mennonites trace their roots to a group of Christian radicals in 16th century Germany and surrounding areas that emerged in opposition to both Roman Catholic doctrine and mainstream Protestant faiths during the Reformation.

In the 1920s, a group of about 6,000 moved to northern Mexico and established themselves as important crop producers.

Still speaking Plautdietsch – a blend of Low German, Prussian dialects and Dutch – a few thousand moved to the forests of Campeche in the 1980s. They bought and leased tracts of jungle, some from local Maya indigenous communities. More arrived in recent years as climate change worsened drought in the north.

In 1992, legislation made it easier to develop, rent or sell previously protected forest, increasing deforestation and the number of farms in the state.

When Mexico opened up the use of genetically modified soy in the 2000s, Mennonites in Campeche embraced the crop and the use of the glyphosate weedkiller Roundup, designed to work alongside GMO crops, according to Edward Ellis, a researcher at Universidad Veracruzana.

The higher yields mean more income to support large families – 10 children is not unusual – and live a simple life supported by the land, said historian Royden Loewen, explaining that settlements often invest as much as 90% of profits to buy land.

At least five Mennonites who spoke to Reuters said they wanted to acquire more land for their families.

While most Mexican Mennonites remain in the north, there are now between 14,000 and 15,000 in Campeche spread over about 20 settlements.

“If God grants you, then you grow,” said Dyck Thiessen, who has attended government meetings but did not sign the agreement.

FOREST TOLL

The Mennonites largely maintain a tense peace with local indigenous communities who serve as guardians to the surrounding forest but also rent equipment from their new neighbors for their own land.

“With them, we began to have access to machinery. We see that it gives us results,” said Wilfredo Chicav, 56, a Maya farmer.

Such advances in agricultural efficiency have taken a toll on the Maya Forest, home to fauna that includes up to 400 species of birds.

Its 100 species of mammal include the jaguar, at risk of extinction in Mexico if its habitat shrinks, said the forestry commission’s Tucuch.

Between 2001 and 2018, the three states that comprise the forest in Mexico lost about 15,000 sq km of tree cover, an area that would cover much of El Salvador.

This is driving a shorter rainy season. Farmers used to schedule planting for the first of May, now they often wait until July as less forest implies less rainfall capture, leading to a drop in moisture uptake in the air and a decrease in rain, Tucuch said

Campeche’s Environment Secretary, Sandra Laffon, said the Mennonites in the state did not always have the right paperwork to turn the forest into farmland.

Reyna Tecua acknowledged problems with land purchases. Families sometimes fall victim to deals based on a handshake and verbal word, and sellers can take advantage by promising land that is not up for legal sale in the first place, he said.

The agreement signed last year created a permanent working group between the government and Mennonite communities to try to resolve permitting, land ownership and administrative and criminal complaints against them from local people including for illegal logging.

Laffon said there were signs the agreement is having an impact. Global Forest Watch data showed a decrease in deforestation in Campeche in 2021, but said that could be the result of factors including a lack of remaining land suitable for agriculture and government incentive programs, which include a nationwide scheme popular with Maya indigenous farmers that rewards tree planting.

Mennonite leaders are seeking a proposal from the government that won’t cut their production dramatically, Reyna Tecua said. A government plan to phase out glyphosate by 2024 is the biggest worry for many, he said.

    However, lower production may be a price farmers, including Mennonites, have to pay to protect the environment, Laffon said.

“We are at the point of having to sacrifice our position” as Mexico’s second largest grain producer “for a healthier Campeche,” she said.

Lifting his cap to wipe sweat from his brow, Dyck Thiessen, the Mennonite leader, doubted organic methods proposed by the government would be successful. Tension with officials has stalled his plans to acquire more land, he said.

Still, he has faith.

“If the government shuts us down,” he says, “God will open for us.”

(Reporting by Cassandra Garrison; additional reporting by Adrian Virgen and Jose Luis Gonzalez; editing by Stephen Eisenhammer and Frank Jack Daniel)

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By Uditha Jayasinghe and Devjyot Ghoshal

COLOMBO (Reuters) -Sri Lanka’s parliament will elect a new president on July 20, its speaker said on Monday, after protesters stormed the residences of the current president and prime minister, who have both offered to quit amid an economic meltdown.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who had overseen a ruthless crushing of the Tamil Tigers insurgents as defence secretary, is set to resign on Wednesday. His brothers and nephew earlier quit as ministers as Sri Lanka began running out of fuel, food and other essentials in the worst crisis since independence from Britain in 1948.

Parliament will reconvene on Friday and will vote to elect a new president five days later, Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena said in a statement.

“During the party leaders’ meeting held today it was agreed that this was essential to ensure a new all-party government is in place in accordance with the Constitution,” the statement added.

“The ruling party has said the prime minister and the Cabinet are ready to resign to appoint an all-party government”

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, whose private home was set alight by protesters, has said he will step down. His office said Rajapaksa had confirmed his resignation plans to the prime minister, adding that the cabinet would resign once a deal was reached to form an all-party government.

The political instability could damage negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a rescue package, the central bank governor told Reuters.

Governor P. Nandalal Weerasinghe signalled he would stay on in the job although he had said in May he could resign if there was no political stability in the island nation of 22 million.

Leaders of the protest movement have said crowds will occupy the residences of the president and prime minister in Colombo until they finally quit office. Over the weekend at the president’s house, protesters jumped into the swimming pool, lounged on a four-poster bed, jostled for turns on a treadmill and tried out the sofas.

Colombo was calm on Monday as hundreds of people strolled into the president’s secretariat and residence and toured the colonial-era buildings. Police made no attempt to intervene.

“We are not going anywhere till this president leaves and we have a government that is acceptable to the people,” said Jude Hansana, 31, who has been at a protest site outside the residence since early April.

Another protester, Dushantha Gunasinghe, said he had travelled 130 km (80 miles) to Colombo, walking part of the way because of a fuel crunch.

“I’m so exhausted I can barely speak,” said the 28-year-old as he sat outside the president’s office. “I came alone all this way because I believe we need to see this through. This government needs to go home and we need better leaders.”

Police said they had received 17.8 million rupees (about $50,000) found by a group of protesters at the president’s residence on Saturday. A video of the youngsters counting out the cash went viral on social media.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a smooth transition of government and “sustainable solutions” to the economic crisis.

‘IT’S TOTAL CHAOS’

Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, whose Samagi Jana Balawegaya party holds 54 seats in the 225-member parliament, said it was ready to step into the government.

“We as the opposition are ready to provide leadership to stabilise the country and rebuild the economy,” he said. “We will appoint a new president, prime minister and form a government.”

Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe were not in their residences when the protesters surged into the buildings and have not been seen in public since Friday. Rajapaksa’s whereabouts were not clear, but Wickremesinghe’s media team said in a statement he held a meeting with cabinet ministers at the prime minister’s office on Monday.

Wickremesinghe’s private home in an affluent Colombo suburb was set on fire on Saturday, and three suspects have been arrested.

Constitutional experts say once the president and prime minister resign, the speaker will be appointed as acting president before parliament votes in a new president to complete Rajapaksa’s term that was to end in 2024.

Sri Lankans have mainly blamed Rajapaksa for the collapse of the tourism-dependent economy, which was hammered badly by the COVID-19 pandemic and a ban on chemical fertilisers that damaged farm output. The ban was later reversed.

Government finances were crippled by mounting debt and lavish tax breaks given by the Rajapaksa regime. Foreign exchange reserves were quickly depleted as oil prices rose.

The country barely has any dollars left to import fuel, which has been severely rationed, and long lines have formed in front of shops selling cooking gas. Headline inflation hit 54.6% last month, and the central bank has warned that it could rise to 70% in the coming months.

The political crisis sent government bonds, which are already in default, to new lows. The 2025 bond fell as much as 2.25 cents on the dollar while most were now under 30 cents, or 70% below their face value.

Lutz Roehmeyer of Capitulum Asset Management, which holds Sri Lanka dollar bonds, said an IMF deal could happen this year or next, but for bondholders, a restructuring was likely only in 2024 or 2025, not next year.

“It’s total chaos,” Roehmeyer said. “Expectations are that the transition of power will be more chaotic and it will take longer to strike a deal.”

(Reporting by Uditha Jayasinghe and Devjyot Ghoshal; Additional reporting by Marc Jones and Karin Strohecker in London, Michelle Nichols in New York; Writing by Krishna N. Das; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Nick Macfie)

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By Anna Voitenko and Tom Balmforth

CHASIV YAR, Ukraine/KYIV (Reuters) – Rescuers pulled survivors on Monday from an apartment block destroyed by a Russian missile strike that killed 31 people in eastern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said while lamenting Moscow’s firepower advantage despite billions in Western aid.

The civilian deaths hammered home the human cost of Russia’s invasion, now in its fifth month, as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces push to capture all of Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region after declaring victory in one of its two provinces this month.

In the city of Chasiv Yar, rescue workers made voice contact with two people in the wreckage of the five-storey building demolished on Saturday. Video showed them pulling survivors from the debris, where up to two dozen people had been trapped.

But the death toll also rose steadily, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said, as more bodies were pulled from under ruined concrete. In a nightly address, Zelenskiy said 31 people had been killed and nine saved from the rubble.

One survivor, who gave her name as Venera, said she had wanted to save her two kittens.

“I was thrown into the bathroom, it was all chaos, I was in shock, all covered in blood,” she said, crying. “By the time I left the bathroom, the room was full up of rubble, three floors fell down.

“I never found the kittens.”

Rescuers could be seen lifting one person from the ruins to a stretcher, and carrying away two bodies in white bags.

Military experts say Russia is using barrages like the one on Chasiv Yar in Donetsk province to pave the way for a renewed push for territory by ground forces, after claiming victory in Luhansk province on July 4. Both have been partly controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014.

Putin, who says he aims to hand control of Donbas to the separatists, on Monday eased rules for Ukrainians to acquire Russian citizenship.

“(Russia) indeed unfortunately has a big advantage in artillery,” President Zelenskiy told reporters in Kyiv earlier on Monday alongside Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

“With all the partners who are ready to give support, I talk about artillery. There is indeed not enough.”

A spokesman for Ukraine’s International Legion, a fighting unit of foreign troops, said Ukraine’s heavy artillery was outnumbered roughly eight to one by Russian guns.

Reuters could not independently verify battlefield accounts.

‘I SAW LIGHTS’

Further north in the second-largest city of Kharkiv, Russian artillery, rocket and tank attacks killed three and injured 31, including two children, regional governor Oleh Synehubov said.

At least one strike hit a residential building in the city, where a column of flats had collapsed into rubble.

“I saw lights, the headlights of rescuers and I started screaming ‘I am alive, please get me out’,” survivor Valentina Popovichuk told Reuters on a nearby Kharkiv street.

She was asleep when her building was hit three or four times in the early morning. “The rescuers entered the hallway, knocked down the door and took me out.”

Kharkiv, in the northeast close to the Russian border but outside the Donbas, suffered heavy bombardment in the first few months of the war followed by a period of relative calm that has been shattered by renewed shelling in recent weeks.

Moscow denies targeting civilians but many Ukrainian cities, towns and villages have been left in ruins. Since the Feb. 24 invasion, attacks on a theatre, shopping centre and railway station have caused many civilian deaths.

Zelenskiy said Russia had carried out 34 air strikes since Saturday.

DIPLOMATIC FAULTLINES

The war has exposed diplomatic faultlines across Europe and sent energy and food prices soaring.

The West aims to reopen Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, which it says are shut by a Russian blockade, halting exports from one of the world’s main sources of grain and threatening to exacerbate global hunger.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who has offered to mediate on the grain issue, discussed it with Putin by telephone. The Kremlin said the talks took place in the run-up to a Russian-Turkish summit scheduled for the near future.

A summit with Erdogan would potentially be Putin’s first face-to-face meeting with a leader of a NATO country since the invasion, and were it to take place in Turkey, it would also be his first trip outside the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Europe’s dependence on Russian energy was preoccupying policymakers and businesses as the biggest pipeline carrying Russian gas to Germany began 10 days of annual maintenance. Governments, markets and companies are worried the shutdown might be extended because of the war.

Putin calls the conflict, Europe’s biggest since World War Two, a “special military operation” to demilitarise Ukraine and rid it of dangerous nationalists. Ukraine and its Western allies say Putin’s war is an imperial-style land grab.

WAVE OF BOMBARDMENTS

Ukraine’s general staff said Russia had launched a wave of bombardments as they seek to seize Donetsk. It said the widespread shelling amounted to preparations for an intensification of hostilities.

Russia’s defence ministry said its missiles struck ammunition depots in Ukraine’s central Dnipro region used to supply rocket launchers and artillery weapons.

Ukraine is preparing a counter-attack in the south of the country where Russia seized territory early in the war.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk warned civilians in the Russian-occupied Kherson region in the south on Sunday to urgently evacuate. She gave no time frame.

(Reporting by Reuters bureaux; writing by Frank Jack Daniel, Nick Macfie and Rami Ayyub; editing by Mark Heinrich, Peter Graff and Aurora Ellis)

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