State of the Union: Ukraine grain deal halted as Latin America comes to Brussels

After Ukraine knocked out a section of the Kerch bridge that forms the only link between Crimea and mainland Russia, Moscow announced it was pulling out of a year-old deal keeping grain flowing to the rest of the world from the embattled country. At the same time, the European Union was hosting a region that had seen food prices go up sharply as a result of the war in Ukraine: Latin America and the Caribbean. At the first summit of the two continents in eight years in Brussels this week, both sides celebrated the event as a kind of family reunion after a long period of estrangement – despite numerous political differences. For Anna Ayuso, a senior research fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, the summit was a well-timed fresh start. "We can say that this is a new beginning for something that happened (before) and it's not exactly only a picture of a reunion," she told Euronews. "The summit is the moment when everybody puts the cards on the table, and we can see in which questions we can have agreements and in which others we have differences, and the differences prevail."