A worker handles wheat grains in a storage silo at the Aranka Malom kft factory in Bíčke, Hungary, Tuesday, May 16, 2023. The Black Sea deal enables Ukraine to ship more than 30 million tons of agricultural products from three major ports, helping global food prices fall after a surge in the wake of the Russian invasion.
Arcos Stiller | Bloomberg | Getty Images
washington — A landmark agricultural deal between Ukraine and Russia is set to expire on Monday, news that is expected to further intensify the global fallout from the Kremlin’s ongoing war if Moscow refuses to renew it.
Last week, Secretary-General António Guterres sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin outlining proposals to save the deal. On Friday, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that conversations with the Kremlin would continue over the weekend via Signal and WhatsApp.
Moscow insists that the current agreement only supports Ukrainian agricultural products and not Russian fertilizer exports, which are also included in the agreement but have not yet been shipped to global destinations.
On Thursday, Putin reiterated Moscow’s stance and threatened not to renew the deal for the fourth time since it was signed.
On July 29, in Odessa, Ukraine, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Ukrainian soldier stood in front of a granary in Odessa’s Black Sea Port, waiting for food to be shipped. The Ukrainian government waited for the signal from the United Nations and Turkey to start delivering food. 2022. Reuters/Nacho Doce
Sweet Nacho | Reuters
Kiev and Moscow accounted for nearly a quarter of global food exports before Russian troops flooded the Ukrainian border in late February 2022. Those agricultural shipments were suspended for nearly six months until representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the United Nations and Turkey agreed to create a humanitarian sea corridor under the Black Sea Food Initiative.
The deal, struck last July, eased Russia’s naval blockade with the reopening of three major Ukrainian ports.
Under the agreement, more than 1,000 ships carrying nearly 33 million tons of agricultural products have departed from Ukraine’s war-torn ports of Odessa, Chernomorsk and South Pivdeny.
The agreement also Supervised the transportation of 725,167 tons of wheat Travel on WFP ships to some of the world’s most food-insecure countries, such as Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
In an update on Saturday, the U.N.-backed group that tracks exports from the deal said no ships had sailed from the Ukrainian port of South Pivdeny in nearly three months. What’s more, no new ships have been allowed to leave Ukraine in the past two weeks.
‘This is not a deal we agreed to’
Both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s top diplomat Sergey Lavrov have accused the West of creating global insecurity and instability.
Sean Gallup
In April, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov warned that Moscow would not renew the agreement if the Black Sea Food Initiative did not soon include fertilizer products.
“It’s not called the food deal, it’s called the Black Sea Initiative and the deal itself states in the text that this applies to expanding opportunities to export food and fertilizer,” Lavrov told reporters at a UN press conference on April 26
“This is not the deal we agreed to on July 22,” he said, adding that dozens of Russian ships were loaded with about 200,000 tonnes of fertilizer awaiting export. In addition to fertilizer exports, the Kremlin has demanded the restoration of a pipeline that passes through Russia and ends in a Ukrainian port.
One of Moscow’s first demands, however, is the return of Rosselkhozbank to the SWIFT banking system.
Moscow was excluded from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) in the days following a full-scale Russian invasion, cutting the country off from much of the world’s financial networks.
