A employee handles wheat grain in a granary on the Aranka Malom kft mill in Bicske, Hungary, Tuesday, May 16, 2023. The Black Sea deal allowed Ukraine to ship greater than 30 million tons of produce from three major ports, helping to bring world food prices down after soaring soaring after the invasion of Russia.
Akos Stiller | Bloomberg | Getty’s paintings
WASHINGTON — A landmark agricultural deal negotiated between Ukraine and Russia is ready to run out on Monday, which is predicted to further exacerbate the worldwide effects of the Kremlin’s ongoing war if Moscow refuses to renew the deal.
Last week, Secretary General Antonio Guterres sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin outlining proposals to avoid wasting the deal. On Friday, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that talks with the Kremlin via Signal and WhatsApp would proceed over the weekend.
Moscow maintains that the present deal only supports Ukrainian agricultural products, not the export of Russian fertilizers, that are also covered by the deal but haven’t yet gone global.
On Thursday, Putin repeated Moscow’s position and for the fourth time because the starting of the agreement threatened to not renew it.
A Ukrainian soldier stands in front of grain silos from the port of Odessa on the Black Sea, before grain is shipped as the federal government of Ukraine waits for a signal from the UN and Turkey to start shipping grain, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in Odessa, Ukraine, July 29, 2022. REUTERS/Nacho Doce
Nacho Doce | Reuters
By the point Russian troops crossed Ukraine’s borders in late February 2022, Kiev and Moscow accounted for nearly 1 / 4 of the world’s grain exports. These agricultural shipments were halted for nearly six months until representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the UN and Turkey agreed to create a humanitarian sea corridor under the Black Sea Grains Initiative.
The deal, brokered last July, eased the Russian naval blockade by reopening three key Ukrainian ports.
Under the agreement, greater than 1,000 ships carrying almost 33 million tons of agricultural products left the war-worn Ukrainian ports of Odessa, Chernomorsk and Yuzhny-Pivdennyi.
The contract also has supervised the transport of 725,167 tons of wheat sail on World Food Program ships to some countries of the world where food is scarce, similar to Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
The UN-backed organization answerable for tracking exports under the deal said in a Saturday announcement that no ship had sailed from the Ukrainian port of Yuzhny-Pivdenny for nearly three months. Furthermore, no recent ships have been approved to sail from Ukraine within the last two weeks.
“Not the deal we agreed to”
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s top diplomat Sergey Lavrov blamed the West for creating global uncertainty and instability.
Sean Gallup
In April, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that if the Black Sea Grains Initiative didn’t include fertilizer products soon, Moscow wouldn’t renew the contract.
“It was not called the grain agreement, however the Black Sea Initiative, and within the text of the agreement it was stated that it concerns the expansion of grain and fertilizer export opportunities” Lavrov told reporters at a press conference on April 26 on the United Nations
“This just isn’t the deal we agreed to on July 22,” he said, adding that there have been dozens of Russian ships loaded with around 200,000 tons of fertilizer waiting for export. Along with the inclusion of fertilizer exports, the Kremlin also demanded the resumption of the pipeline, which runs through Russia and ends in a Ukrainian port.
One in all Moscow’s foremost demands, nonetheless, is the return of the Russian Agricultural Bank (Rosselkhozbank) to the SWIFT banking system.
Moscow’s exclusion from SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, cut the country off from many of the world’s financial networks inside days of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
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