Moscow has given the U.N. Secretariat-General three months to meet its conditions for reactivating a year-old agreement that had allowed Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea.
“The U.N. has three months to achieve concrete results,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on July 19.
Otherwise, the agreement would be considered a dead letter, she said.
Brokered in 2022 by the U.N. and Turkey, the agreement expired on July 17. Moscow declined to renew it, however, saying key conditions were never fulfilled.
The first part of the deal allows Ukraine to continue exporting grain through the Black Sea, despite the ongoing conflict with Russia.
Since the agreement came into effect, Ukraine has exported more than 30 million tons of grain from three Black Sea ports, including Odesa, Ukraine.
But according to Moscow, the second part of the deal—in the form of a memorandum signed by the U.N. and Russia—was never properly implemented.
The memorandum calls for the removal of obstacles to Russian grain and fertilizer exports and allows Russia to purchase needed agricultural equipment.
It also calls for the reconnection of Russia’s state-run agricultural bank to the SWIFT payment system and the resumption of Russian ammonia exports through a pipeline that runs through Ukrainian territory.
In early June, the pipeline, which links Russia’s city of Togliatti to Odesa, was intentionally ruptured.
Moscow blamed Ukrainian “saboteurs” for the breach, which occurred in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.
According to Ukrainian officials, the breach was caused by Russian artillery fire.
Moscow: UN ‘Twisting Facts’
When Russia withdrew from the grain deal earlier this week, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the U.N.–Russia memorandum, too, was no longer valid.But Moscow says the U.N. chief is “twisting the facts” about the agreements.
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the memorandum states that both parties—the U.N. and Russia—must provide three months’ notice if they want to withdraw from the terms laid out therein.
“Therefore, the U.N. Secretariat has 90 days to continue its efforts to normalize Russian agricultural exports,” the ministry said in a statement.
During that period, it noted, Russia also expects Rosselkhozbank, its primary state-run agricultural bank, to be reconnected to the SWIFT payment system.
On July 18, a U.N. spokesman said Mr. Guterres was exploring “all possible avenues to ensure that Ukrainian grain, Russian grain, [and] Russian fertilizer are out on the global market.”
“There are a number of ideas being floated,” the spokesman said without elaborating.
Both Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s top exporters of grain.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has reportedly contacted the U.N. chief in hopes of maintaining Ukraine’s grain exports—albeit without Russian involvement.
At a July 18 press briefing, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller confirmed that Mr. Zelenskyy “has a proposal that he has made to the U.N.”
“We’re in discussions with our Ukrainian counterparts about that,” Mr. Miller said. “We’re going to do everything we can to help Ukraine find a resolution.”
Some European Union officials have suggested that Ukrainian grain could be transported overland—by road or by rail—rather than through the Black Sea.
But Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, has said that such a scenario wouldn’t make up for “the absence of deliveries from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.”
‘Food as a Weapon of War’
Russian officials also complain that the grain deal failed to achieve its original purpose—namely, to ensure food security for poor nations.According to Moscow, less than 5 percent of Ukraine’s grain exports reached low-income countries under the deal, and most went to wealthy European states.
But Mr. Miller challenged this assertion.
“Sixty-five percent of these shipments [carried out under the deal] have gone to some of the world’s most vulnerable countries and people,” he said, accusing Russia of “using food as a weapon of war.”
“The world should not be fooled by Moscow’s latest lies.”
On July 18, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke by phone with his Turkish counterpart to discuss means of ensuring continued grain exports.
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the two men discussed “other options for delivering grain to the neediest countries that would not be in thrall to the subversive actions of the Kyiv regime and its Western handlers.”
