Moscow says Black Sea grain deal is dead

The Kremlin said on Monday that a U.N.-brokered deal to allow the safe passage of Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea is terminated, claiming that Russia’s conditions had not been met.

“The Black Sea agreements ceased to be valid today,” Dmitry Peskov, press secretary of Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters on Monday, according to Russian news agency TASS.

“As the president of the Russian Federation said earlier, the deadline is July 17. Unfortunately, the part relating to Russia in this Black Sea agreement has not been implemented so far. Therefore, its effect is terminated,” Peskov said.

“As soon as the Russian conditions are met, the Russian Federation will return to the implementation of the deal,” he said.

The Black Sea grain initiative, which was first brokered by the United Nations and Turkey a year ago in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was last renewed on May 17 for two months.

Some 33 million metric tons of grain and oilseeds have so far been exported under the deal, which has been extended three times, offering a lifeline to Ukraine’s farmers and to food-insecure countries in the Global South. 

Moscow has repeatedly said it would not agree to a further extension, claiming that it is not seeing the benefit of the pact. “Hidden” Western sanctions, the Kremlin says, are hindering Russia’s own food and fertilizer exports and thus contravening a second deal agreed last July under which the U.N. committed to facilitate these exports for a three-year period.

Last Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres sent a letter to Putin putting forward a compromise proposal to meet a Kremlin demand that Russia’s state agricultural bank be readmitted to the SWIFT payments system. 

Two days later, however, Putin reiterated that conditions required for Russia to extend the pact had not been met. “We voluntarily extended this so-called deal many times. Many times. But listen, in the end, enough is enough,” the Russian president said in a TV interview on Thursday night.

The last ship to travel under the pact left Ukraine’s Odesa port on Sunday morning, according to Reuters. In the run-up to the July 17 deadline, the number of shipments had fallen — dropping to 1.3 million metric tons in May from 4.2 million last October — while no new vessels have been registered under the initiative since the end of June.

Kyiv, which accuses Moscow of sabotaging the deal, is readying alternative routes to export its grain and oilseed crops. 

Aid agencies, meanwhile, are bracing for the impact of the deal’s end on global food prices, which they say will hit the world’s most vulnerable in food-insecure countries the hardest.