It was signed a year ago and allowed the output of production from Black Sea ports to the rest of the world.
The Russian government announced early this Monday that will not renew the agreement that allows, under the supervision of Turkey and the United Nations, the export of Ukrainian grain from Ukrainian Black Sea ports to the rest of the world through the Turkish straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.
The agreement, signed a year ago, is key because Ukraine is one of the world’s largest cereal export powers and because the cereal inputs of dozens of countries in the Middle East and North Africa depend on it. The Russian Navy controls shipping in the Black Sea. Without their proval it is impossible to take out grain by ships from the ports of Ukraine.
In the year that the agreement worked, despite interruptions and delays caused by Russian controllers, allowed the export of more than 33 million tons.
Hours before, although Moscow said it had nothing to do with it, Russia accused Ukraine of attacking the bridge that unites, through the Kerch Strait, the Ukrainian peninsula (occupied by Russia since 2014) of Crimea with Russian territory. Inaugurated in 2018 by Vladimir Putin himself, the 19-kilometre bridge symbolizes the illegal annexation of that Ukrainian province.
Turkiye’s role
The Russian government press agency TASS reported early on Monday that the Russian Administration had informed Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations that it was not renewing the agreement. Moscow has been threatening that decision for weeks.
He complained that his own fertilizer exports were being put in trouble and assured that the initial objective of the agreement, that Ukrainian cereals reach the poorest countries on the planet, had not been respected. Ukraine was until the start of the war the fifth world exporter of cereals.
Russia demands, to return to the agreement, to bring the Togliatti-Odesa pipeline back into operation which allows you to send ammonia, an indispensable component to produce fertilizers. In early June an explosion ruptured a part of that pipeline in northeastern Ukraine. Moscow accused kyiv of the explosion and kyiv accused Moscow.
Turkey, an essential part of the agreement as its supervisor with its inspectors, regretted the non-renewal of the agreement. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he hoped he could convince his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin “so that the agreement continues despite today’s statement.”
The Ukrainian government reacted by saying that it will try to continue with the exports despite the Russian announcement. President Volodimir Zelensky said that “even without Russia we have to do everything we can to to be able to continue using that corridor (the shipping route through the Black Sea used by ships). We are not afraid”.
The problem for Ukraine is that most of the vessels that take out its grain are not owned by companies from countries in the Middle East, North Africa or Europe. Much of the grain leaves the Ukraine and crosses the Mediterranean to Spain, from where it is re-exported to African countries.
Alternatives
The European Union tried for months to find alternative ways to get the grain out of Ukraine. Options such as loading it on trains and take it out to Poland to ship it in the ports of northern Poland and Germany. But it was an insufficient alternative. He had to leave by ships.
Turkey managed, with the support of the United Nations, to get the Russians to accept the deal because Ankara assured that ships entering the Black Sea through its straits bound for ports controlled by Ukraine they did not carry weons to reinforce the Ukrainian Army.
The United States denounced yesterday that the Russian decision is “an act of cruelty.” Washington assures that “Russia plays two political games and many people are going to suffer.” Without Ukrainian grain the prices of many food inputs will rise as they did when the war broke out and Russia blocked Ukrainian exports.
The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, said this Monday that hundreds of millions of people “are going to pay the price” for the rise in the price of cereals: “Hundreds of millions of people they face hunger and consumers are facing a global cost of living crisis. They will pay the price.”
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Source: Clarin
