Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan assured this Friday that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, agrees to extend the Black Sea Grains Agreement, the current extension ends next Monday.
“We are preparing to receive Putin in August and we agree on the extension of the Black Sea grain agreement,” which will allow Ukraine to export its production, Erdogan said in a remark at the end of Friday prayers (the day that sacred to Muslims).
The Turkish head of state said he had spoken with his Russian counterpart, but did not specify when the talk with Putin took place.
The current extension of the agreement, signed in Istanbul in the summer of 2022 by Ukraine and Russia brokered by the UN and Turkey, ends on July 17. In addition to Ukrainian grains, the document also covered exports of Russian fertilizers and food products.
While it has not been destructive in this regard, Russia has signaled it repeatedly does not intend the so-called Citizens’ Grains from the Black Seaclaim that on the one hand it has become a commercial rather than a humanitarian pact and, on the other hand, the Russian memorandum remains unfulfilled.
Moscow has contested barriers to the export of fertilizers and food productsclaiming to be agricultural sector is damaged by sanctions imposed by the West after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In the countdown to another renewal of the agreement, UN Secretary-General António Guterres this week sent a letter to Putin proposing to facilitate Russian exports of food and fertilizers and Ukrainian grains.
“I hope that with this letter we can secure the renewal of the grain agreement, with our joint efforts and the efforts of Russia,” Erdogan said, referring to Guterres’s letter.
Putin is still not announcing a final decision with a few days to go before the end of the deal, which expires at midnight on Monday in Istanbul (10 p.m. in Lisbon).
On Thursday, Putin indicated that “not one” of the Russian requests had been considered so far.
“Let’s think about what to do, we still have a few days,” he added.
To convince the Russian leadership, Guterres plans to remove obstacles to Russia’s fertilizer exports — another part of the July 2022 deal that Moscow says has not been respected — by “removing obstacles to financial transactions from the Agricultural Bank of Russia.”
The letter addressed to Putin and the grain deal were at the center of a two-day meeting between the UN chief and the European Union (EU), which ends this Friday in the suburbs of Brussels.
According to United Nations data, nearly 33 million tons of grain have been shipped from the ports of southern Ukraine since the agreement came into force.
Source: DN
