Reuters, September 9 – Russia declared on Saturday that it will adhere to its demands in order to rejoin the grain agreement for the Black Sea that it had left in July.
Russia has to join its state agricultural bank to the global SWIFT bank payments system, not a subsidiary of the bank as suggested by the UN, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
“Every one of our terms is quite widely known. They don’t need to be interpreted since they are entirely solid, and all of this is definitely doable, according to Peskov.
As a result, Russia retains its consistent, unambiguous, and responsible stance, which has been expressed by the president on several occasions.
In July 2022, Turkey and the UN brokered the Black Sea agreement to permit grain exports by sea from Ukraine despite the ongoing conflict and to lessen the effects of a food crisis worldwide.
A pact to promote Russian shipments of food and fertilizer was also included, but Moscow claims the pact has not been carried out. Russia was accused of using food as a weapon by Kyiv and the West after it regularly targeted Ukrainian ports and grain storage facilities after terminating the grain agreement.
Five days after Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan to address the grain issue, Moscow reiterated its stance without wiggle room.
BANKING PROBLEM
Despite the West has not expressly sanctioned Russia’s exports of grain and fertilizer, the country claims that in reality those exports are impeded by restrictions on port access, insurance, logistics, and payments, including the exclusion of the agricultural bank Rosselkhozbank from the SWIFT system.
The United Nations has suggested that a Rosselkhozbank subsidiary with its headquarters in Luxembourg might apply right away to SWIFT to “effectively enable access” for the bank within 30 days.
The agreements state that Rosselkhozbank, and not its subsidiary, should have access to SWIFT. We are discussing the necessity of going back to the fundamentals, to the initial agreements that were made and that we were assured would be carried out, Peskov added.
“The president made it quite obvious that the deal would resume as soon as they were satisfied.
