Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement in Istanbul on Friday to unblock more than 20 million tons of grain stuck in blockaded Black Sea ports in Ukraine, a deal aimed at bringing down soaring grain prices and alleviating a mounting global hunger crisis.
The breakthrough comes after months of talks and was brokered with the help of the United Nations and Turkey.
Senior United Nations officials said that the first shipments of grain out of Odesa and neighboring ports were mere weeks away and would quickly bring five million metric tons of Ukrainian grain and other foodstuffs to the world market per month. That would also free up storage space in Ukraine’s silos for freshly harvested grain, the officials said.
This agreement did not come easy,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said at the signing ceremony in Istanbul on Friday, calling the deal a “beacon in the Black Sea.”
He praised Ukraine, Russia and Turkey for working together to secure the breakthrough.
“Since the war started, I have been highlighting that there is no solution to the global food crisis without ensuring full global access to Ukraine’s food products and Russian food and fertilizer,” he said. “Today we took important steps to achieve this objective. But it has been a long road.”
Kyiv and Moscow have agreed on very little since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24. Negotiations held in Belarus that month and in March went nowhere, because Russia insisted on a change of government in Kyiv. Later in March, talks in Turkey were also ultimately fruitless.
However, negotiators have been able to reach agreements about evacuating a steel plant in Mariupol where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians were holed up for 80 days. Both sides have also agreed on several occasions to exchange prisoners and the corpses of dead soldiers. But this is the first time that representatives from both countries have publicly signed an agreement in a signing ceremony.
“It’s a big step forward,” Stephen E. Flynn, founding director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University, said of Friday’s deal, crediting the Turks with an “elegant approach.” But he warned that it will be difficult to speedily clear the logjam and deliver food to where it is most needed.
“The Black Sea is a juggernaut that has to be cleared,” and the mechanics of doing that — especially in wartime conditions when trust levels are low — are extremely complex. “It will not move quickly,” he said.