Farmer Marin Iliev takes pictures in his fields near the town of Saedinenie in central Bulgaria on April 20, 2023.
Nikolai Deutchinov | AFP | Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Russia has yet to decide whether to extend the terms of an international agreement that guarantees food security for tens of millions of people, a decision that could further intensify the fallout from the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.
By all accounts, the deal brokered in July to reopen major ports, the so-called Black Sea Grain Initiative, is due to expire on May 18.
Earlier on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there were “many open questions” about a possible extension of the deal.
“We will inform you when the appropriate decision is taken, and that is the only thing I can say so far,” Peskov told reporters at his daily news conference.
Before Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border last February, Kiev and Moscow accounted for almost a quarter of global grain exports. Those shipments were severely disrupted for nearly six months before representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the United Nations and Turkey agreed to create a humanitarian sea corridor and reopen three Ukrainian ports.
A ship carrying wheat from Ukraine to Afghanistan after being inspected on the high seas near the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul, Turkey, January 24, 2023.
TUR Defense | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
According to the agreement, more than 950 ships are carried More than 30.2 million metric tons Produce has been shipped from Ukraine’s war-torn ports of Odessa, Chernomorsk and Yuzhny-Pivdennyi.
on Monday Comment Speaking at the UN Security Council, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Martin Griffiths said more than 55 percent of the shipment had reached the world’s hungriest country.
He added that the latest analysis by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations shows that global grain prices have fallen by nearly 20% in the past year, and international wheat prices have fallen to their lowest level since July 2021.
“That’s not the deal we agreed to”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov speaks to the media during a news conference at United Nations headquarters in New York City, April 25, 2023.
Spencer Pratt | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Moscow insists that the current deal will only benefit Kiev because Russian fertilizer exports cannot travel through the sea corridors like Ukrainian grain.
Last month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov again threatened to abandon the agreement.
“It’s not called the grain deal, it’s called the Black Sea Initiative, and in the agreement itself, the agreement states that this applies to expanding opportunities to export grain and fertilizer,” Lavrov told reporters at a news conference on April 26.
“This is not an agreement we reached on July 22,” he said, adding that dozens of Russian cargo ships carrying about 200,000 tonnes of fertilizer were waiting in European ports.
Therefore, Moscow called for the resumption of the export of Russian ammonia through the Ukrainian pipeline to the port of Odessa.
Lavrov also said that one of Moscow’s top demands was the return of Rosselkhozbank to the SWIFT banking system.
In the days following a full-scale Kremlin invasion last February, Moscow was excluded from SWIFT, which represents the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, cutting the country off from much of the world’s financial networks.
