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Rising food prices in Latin America and the Caribbean caused the number of people going hungry in those regions to rise by more than 13 million between 2019 and 2021, a United Nations report said Tuesday, according to Agence France-Presse.
The report by three U.N. agencies said the region was particularly vulnerable to the global food crisis caused by Russia's war in Ukraine because of a high reliance on wheat, corn and fertilizer imports.
"The number of people in the region suffering from hunger increased by 13.2 million to 56.5 million," read the report, released at a press conference in Santiago, Chile.
In addition, moderate or severe food insecurity affected 267.7 million people, 40.6% of the region's population, in 2021.
A fuel shortage has led to panic buying at gas stations, Hungarian energy giant MOL said on Tuesday, with blame directed at petrol price caps mandated by Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government, Agence France-Presse reported.
"The supply situation is clearly critical, demand has skyrocketed, consumers are stocking up, and panic buying has begun," said MOL's executive director Gyorgy Bacsa in a statement sent to AFP.
Hungarian media published images of hundred-meter-long lines at filling stations nationwide on Tuesday, while an AFP photographer saw that most pumps were out of order at several stations in Budapest.
The fuel shortage has been caused by a 30% drop in imported fuel, as well as maintenance at one of MOL's refineries, and will take "several weeks" to resolve, he said.
A government-mandated price cap on vehicle fuel products, which has led foreign firms to cut fuel shipments to Hungary, is behind the import shortfall, according to the Association of Independent Petrol Stations (FBSZ).
Disruptions in tanker traffic from Russia's Black Sea ports to the Mediterranean are a result of a new Turkish insurance rule, not the price cap on Russian oil agreed by a coalition of G-7 countries and Australia, an official with the group said on Tuesday, according to Reuters.
Of the 20 loaded crude oil tankers facing delays in the region, all but one appear to be carrying Kazakh — not Russian — origin oil and would not be subject to the price cap "under any scenario," the official said.
Markets are closely watching the impact of a G-7-led price cap on Russian seaborne oil that took effect on Monday, but G-7 officials say the measure did not cause the backup in Turkey's Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits into the Mediterranean.
A Moscow court on Tuesday ordered the arrest in absentia of two Ukrainian ministers after they were accused of violating Russia's territorial integrity, Agence France-Presse reported.
The decision came following a request by the FSB security service to arrest in absentia Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk and Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova.
Russia said in September it had annexed four Ukrainian regions its forces only partially controlled after holding so-called referendums in Donetsk and Lugansk in the east and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south.
Senior Ukrainian political figures including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have traveled across the country including to the regions Moscow claimed to have annexed despite the fighting.
Vereshchuk, Ukraine's minister for the reintegration of the occupied territories, traveled to Kherson after Kyiv's forces recaptured the city in November.
Dzhaparova, a Crimean Tatar, promotes issues related to the ethnic minority on the Crimean Peninsula, annexed by Russia is 2014, and calls for international support for the "de-occupation of Crimea and its return to Ukraine."
Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure have sparked "a new level of need" in the war-torn country, the U.N. aid chief said on Tuesday, warning that millions of people are without heat as temperatures drop, Agence France-Presse reported.
Nearly half of Ukraine's energy system has been damaged after months of systematic Russian strikes on power infrastructure, with fresh attacks carried out on Monday.
"Since October, the sustained attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure have created a new level of need that impacts the whole country and exacerbates the needs caused by the war," Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, told the UN Security Council.
Griffiths warned that more people risked being displaced by the conflict, which he said has forced 14 million people from their homes, including 6.5 million within Ukraine and more than 7.8 million who fled the country.