Senior United Nations (UN) and Russian officials met in Geneva on Wednesday to discuss Russian complaints that Western sanctions were impeding its grain and fertilizer exports despite a UN-brokered deal to boost Russian and Ukrainian shipments of the commodities. “The discussions are going on in a very constructive, professional level,” a UN spokesperson said. “The challenges are fairly clear, but I’m not going to get into the detail of what has been discussed around that table.”
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Moscow’s complaints come ahead of likely discussions aimed at extending the initial 120-day deal allowing Ukraine’s Black Sea exports. As we reported in “First Thing Today,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country and the developing world had been “cheated” by a UN-brokered Ukrainian grain export deal, vowing to look to revise its terms to limit the countries that can receive shipments. Putin said Ukrainian grain exports were not going to the world’s poorest countries as originally intended.
The UN has said the export deal is a commercial – not humanitarian – operation driven by the market. “This initiative is about depressing global prices at the wholesale level and that’s what we’re seeing,” the UN spokesperson said.
