Russia is stonewalling in talks about the renewal of a deal that allowed Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea, the UK envoy to the UN has warned.
Barbara Woodward accused Moscow of “cynical brinkmanship” that makes it increasingly unlikely that the deal will be renewed before Tuesday’s deadline.
She said failure to renew the deal would cause global food prices to rise, as the deal had allowed more than 32m tonnes of grain and food exports to leave Ukraine over the past year – with two-thirds going to low to middle-income countries, and some going to countries on the brink of starvation such as Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia.
The Black Sea grain initiative, a rolling four-month agreement that has been renewed three times so far, allows Ukrainian grain ships to leave Ukrainian ports subject to joint inspections by Russia and the UN. There are assurances that Russia grain and fertiliser would be allowed to reach world markets, but Russia says western promises have not been kept.
Speaking on state TV on Thursday, Vladimir Putin said: “We can suspend our participation in the deal, and if everyone once again says that all the promises made to us will be fulfilled, then let them fulfil this promise. We will immediately rejoin this deal.” The Kremlin said his remarks did not mean Russia had definitively decided to quit the programme.
By getting Ukrainian grain on to the market, the deal has helped bring prices down: the global price of wheat has fallen from highs of $450 a tonne in mid-May 2022 to around $250 a tonne in recent months.
But British officials are deeply concerned that with the renewal deadline only days away, Russia is showing little sign of engagement.
In a desperate attempt to kickstart talks on renewal António Guterres, the UN secretary general, wrote to Moscow proposing that a subsidiary of Russia’s agriculture bank could be switched back into the Swift banking transfer system.
So far there has been no official Russian response, and diplomats fear the diplomatic climate is now so poisonous at the UN in New York that Putin may be prepared to end the deal, and not even engage in the brinkmanship that has marked previous moments of renewal. The downside for him is that he might lose allies in Africa if the consensus was that he had been unreasonable.
The fate of the deal, western diplomats believe, may depend on the ability of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, to engage with Putin. Erdoğan brokered the original deal last July. But Putin may feel he owes Erdoğan no favours after the latter’s surprise repatriation of former commanders of Ukraine’s garrison in Mariupol.
Andrew Clark of the UK Foreign Office was equally pessimistic. “The UN and Turkey have been working incredibly hard to draw up agreements that all parties can agree to, in order to secure the renewal. Unfortunately, we’ve seen Russia stalling these discussions and indicating in their public messaging that they will not agree to any renewal”.
Russian claims that its own grain export volumes are being damaged were not matched by statistics showing exports were now above prewar levels, while Ukrainian grain exports were down by more than a fifth.
Woodward also accused Russia of dragging its feet in the existing agreement by taking longer than necessary to inspect commercial ships leaving Ukraine. Ships can be inspected at a rate of more than 40 a day, she said, but Russia was slowing that number down to 10 a day, and sometimes as few as two. Since 28 June, no new ships have been allowed to enter the process. As a result only 1.3m tonnes of grain left Ukraine in May.
Without any deal, Ukraine’s role as the breadbasket of the world can only be protected by exports westward through Poland by road, rail and river, but the volumes would be much reduced. If Turkey was to respond to a breakdown by seeking to protect Ukrainian grain ships, Russia might regard the Turkish navy as legitimate targets, a decision that could bring the Nato member close to conflict with Russia.
