Moscow:
President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday accused Western countries of distorting the expired Black Sea grain deal to their own ends, but said Russia would return to the deal immediately if all conditions were met.
On Monday, Moscow had canceled the deal, allowing Ukraine a year ago to export grain from its Black Sea ports despite the war to ease a global food crisis.
It said a parallel memorandum signed at the same time, intended to facilitate its own grain and fertilizer exports in the face of Western sanctions imposed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine, had been ignored.
“Initially, the essence, the meaning of the grain deal has a colossal humanitarian significance,” Putin said.
“The West has completely debunked and perverted this essence, and instead of helping countries in real need, the West used the grain deal for political blackmail, and moreover… made it a tool to enrich transnational corporations, speculators in the global grain market.”
He reiterated Moscow’s position that it would return to the deal once the West met its top five demands, which Putin listed:
– acquisition of the Russian Agricultural Bank (Rosselkhozbank) in the SWIFT payment system;
– resumption of exports of agricultural machinery and spare parts to Russia;
– lifting restrictions on insurance and access to ports for Russian ships and cargo;
– repair of a damaged ammonia export pipeline from Russian Togliatti to Odessa in Ukraine;
– unblocking accounts and financial activities of Russian fertilizer companies.
“If all these conditions are met, which we agreed before – they are not something I have come up with now – but once they are fulfilled, we will immediately return to the deal,” Putin said.
Earlier, his defense ministry said Moscow would now consider all ships sailing to Ukrainian ports as potential carriers of military cargo.
In addition, the Russian Foreign Ministry gave the United Nations, which brokered the grain deal with Turkey, three months to implement the terms of the memorandum if it wanted Russia to return to the grain deal.
Moscow says it has mounted a “special military operation” to prevent Ukraine from being used by the West to threaten Russia’s security, a charge Ukraine and its Western allies dismiss as an unfounded pretext for war of conquest.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)