The last cargo ship carrying Ukraine’s grain in the Black Sea was inspected Monday night in Istanbul, just hours before the suspension of the Russia-Ukraine deal, the UN announced.
“Inspection of cargo [navio] TQ SAMSUN was finalized by the Joint Coordination Center (JCC), the entity said in a statement, specifying that it was the 1972 that has been carried out since August 1, 2022 under the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
The Turkish-flagged cargo ship “left the port of Odessa in southern Ukraine on Sunday and arrived today [segunda-feira] to the inspection site north of Istanbul, on the Black Sea”, according to the JCC, which was in charge of supervising the implementation of these agreements signed in July 2022 between Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the United Nations.
Each ship to or from Ukrainian ports had to pass an inspection carried out by representatives of the four parties to the agreement, which expires this Monday at midnight in Istanbul (10:00 p.m. in Lisbon).
In an earlier statement, the JCC said inspections could last anywhere from two hours to more than four hours.
The Ukrainians regularly accuse the Russians of deliberately prolonging the examination of cargo ships.
Russia opposed the extension of the agreement while its demands on the trade of its own agricultural products are not met, hampered by the sanctions on its banks, and this Monday denounced the extension of the understanding.
The agreement on Ukrainian grains allowed, despite the ongoing war in Ukraine since the Russian invasion on February 22, 2022, to place more than 30 million tons of grain and agricultural products on the market.
In reaction, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky argued that “even without Russia, everything must be done to use this corridor” in the Black Sea.
“We are not afraid,” he said, in a comment shared on the Facebook social network by his spokesman, Serguei Nykyforov.
The suspension prompted comments from UN Secretary General António Guterres warning that hundreds of millions of people will pay for Russia’s decision to break the deal.
Turkey’s president said, in turn, that he believed that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, “wants to keep” the agreement.
“We are going to take steps in that direction, with a call to Putin, without waiting for August,” he declared.
Moscow’s backtracking on expanding the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which it was already threatening if its demands were not met, has drawn harsh criticism from the European Commission, as well as some of Kiev’s main allies, such as the United States. , the European Commission, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Germany, also warning of its impact on millions of inhabitants of vulnerable countries.
Source: TSF
