Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, added to the uncertainty facing the soon-to-expire Black Sea grain deal, saying on Tuesday that the initiative had failed to deliver any benefits for his country, referring to it as in “deadlock.”
Speaking at a news conference at the United Nations, Mr. Lavrov repeated complaints that Russia continued to face obstacles in selling its own grain and fertilizer because of Western sanctions on its financial transactions.
The sanctions were put in place to punish Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The grain deal, brokered last July by the United Nations and Turkey to allow Ukraine to export grain across the Black Sea, was accompanied by assurances that Russia’s agricultural products would also make it to market. But Russian officials have complained that impediments remain.
Ukraine and Russia are among the world’s largest food exporters, and the grain deal sought to ensure supplies reached hungry nations. Mr. Lavrov disputed that such an outcome had been achieved.
“The grain deal rapidly went from a humanitarian initiative to a commercial initiative,” Mr. Lavrov said, asserting that only some of the grain Ukraine was exporting was reaching poor countries.
He may have been a referring to the grain passing not through the Black Sea, but through European nations. The European Union removed tariffs on Ukrainian grain to ease its overland passage during the war, but some of the grain has flooded markets in Eastern Europe. On Tuesday, a meeting of E.U. agricultural ministers — called to address the fury of Eastern European farmers facing plummeting prices — failed to achieve a resolution.
The grain deal has been extended twice since July, though Russia has chafed at its terms and briefly suspended participation in November. In March, Russia refused to agree to another 120-day extension, limiting its current term to March 18. The U.N. has been seeking to extend the arrangement past that date to protect global food security and prevent a rise in prices.
António Guterres, secretary general of the U.N., is scheduled to travel to Washington on Wednesday to meet with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and members of Congress, according to Stéphane Dujarric, a U.N. spokesman. Among the topics on the agenda are the war in Ukraine and the grain deal.
“We are at a very delicate time in the renewal of the Black Sea initiative,” Mr. Dujarric said. He added that the U.N. was working to push forward a parallel part of the deal relating to Russia’s “ammonia pipeline” for selling fertilizers and grain, but said that several obstacles still remained.
On Monday, the U.N. said that Mr. Guterres gave Mr. Lavrov a letter to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, that laid out a new proposal for extending and expanding the deal. The U.N. added that the same letter had been sent to the other signatories to the deal, the presidents of Ukraine and Turkey. On Tuesday, Mr. Lavrov said Mr. Putin had not yet had a chance to review the letter and formulate a response.
On the European front, the E.U.’s agriculture minister, Janusz Wojciechowski, said that negotiations in Luxembourg on Tuesday had not yet produced a resolution with five member nations — Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria — that acted on their own accord to manage farmers’ anger over the glut of cheap Ukrainian farm imports.
Under pressure to maintain solidarity within the bloc, Mr. Wojciechowski began a news conference after a meeting of the E.U.’s agriculture council by stating that the crisis was “100 percent” caused by Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The five member states, he added, were “very close” to agreeing on a solution to the farmers’ complaints.
The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, has put forth a proposal offering $110 million from the bloc’s crisis reserve fund to help compensate the farmers. It also proposes allowing the five countries to maintain a temporary import ban on a handful of Ukrainian products that make up the vast majority of their Ukrainian imports: corn, wheat, rapeseed, sunflower seeds and sunflower oil, Mr. Wojciechowski said.
In Mr. Lavrov’s news conference on Tuesday, held as Russia began wrapping up its controversial monthlong post as president of the Security Council, he did not contain his comments to the grain initiative.
He also blamed U.S. meddling in Sudan for the current eruption of violence there. Mr. Lavrov said that the U.S.’s “engineering geopolitics” and sanctions on Sudan’s leader had led to the division of the country into Sudan and South Sudan, and added that there must be “African solutions for African problems.”
Mr. Lavrov also defended the presence of the Wagner group, a…
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