A field of young wheat in Uman, Ukraine (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
The United States on Tuesday agreed to help Russia sell its grain and fertilizer on the world market.
The concession to a long-standing Kremlin demand, which drew pushback from Ukrainian officials, came alongside a U.S.-brokered agreement between Russia and Ukraine to expand a limited ceasefire to include the Black Sea, as the Trump administration pushes for a more comprehensive deal.
The grain and fertilizer agreement, announced in a White House statement after U.S.-led negotiations with Russia in Saudi Arabia, came as other agreements were made related to safe navigation in the Black Sea, a vital shipping route by which both Russia and Ukraine reach the Mediterranean.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow has claimed that it has struggled to access gain export markets. In the past, Western officials responded by saying that there were no formal sanctions on the goods and that Russian exports had continued at high levels.
Andrey Sizov, managing director at research firm SovEcon, which tracks the Black Sea grain market, said Tuesday that the U.S. announcement was “surprising,” as Russian food and fertilizer exports had hit “record highs since the war began.” Data collected by SovEcon showed Russian grain exports hitting 71 million metric tons in the 2023-2024 season, compared to just 42 million in 2021-2022.
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“Looks like another nod to Moscow,” Sizov wrote on X, adding that the move could indicate that U.S. sanctions on Rosselkhozbank, a state-owned agricultural bank, would be lifted.
The Kremlin said Tuesday that it would implement the agreements reached in Saudi Arabia only if the West lifted “sanctions on Rosselkhozbank and other financial institutions that provide operations in international trade in food, fishery products and fertilizers.”
“This includes connecting Rosselkhozbank to SWIFT,” the Kremlin added, referring to the global payment system based in Belgium.
The language on U.S. support for Russian grain exports was not included in a separate White House statement detailing the results of U.S. negotiations with Ukraine in Saudi Arabia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the issue had not been on the agenda for those meetings and that Kyiv did not support it.
“We believe that would weaken our position and the sanctions regime,” Zelensky said at a news conference.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former minister of the economy in Ukraine who heads the Kyiv School of Economics, said that the move was clearly a concession to Russia, but it’s unclear for what. He added: “De facto, Ukraine is worse off” with the new provisions.
The talks in Riyadh over recent days came less than two years after Russia unilaterally withdrew from an agreement to allow Black Sea grain exports from Ukraine, claiming that its own demands to allow the export of Russian grain and fertilizer were not being met.
That agreement, known as the Black Sea Grain Initiative and brokered by Turkey and the United Nations, was designed to alleviate global food prices that had surged after Russia invaded Ukraine and cut off a major global grain supplier from world markets.
Earlier on Tuesday, Russia’s top diplomat said that exports via the Black Sea were a key Kremlin priority for the talks being held in Riyadh.
“We are for the resumption of the Black Sea initiative in some form more acceptable to all,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Russian state television, adding that the aim was to make “the grain market, the fertilizer market to be predictable.”
Moscow, Lavrov noted, is concerned about the food situation in Africa and other countries of the Global South that have suffered from the “games of the West.”
Global food prices spiked in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they have remained far lower in the years since then, according to nation statistics.
Daniel Fried, a retired career diplomat who now works for the Atlantic Council, wrote on X that the deal to facilitate exports was a gain for Russia but that there was little sign of gains for Ukraine so far. Russia was “slow walking” the process, he added.