Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov Calls U.N. Proposals “Not Realistic”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s proposals to revive the Black Sea Grain Initiative as “simply not realistic.”

“We don’t reject them. They’re simply not realistic,” Lavrov said in his address to the General Debate of the 78th session of the U.N. General Assembly on Saturday.

Lavrov: Proposals Cannot be Implemented

“They cannot be implemented in and of themselves,” Lavrov told U.N. delegates in New York.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which included a naval blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.

Refusal to Extend Agreement

The U.N. and Türkiye negotiated an international agreement to enable Ukrainian agricultural exports to reach world markets from three ports, but Moscow refused to extend the deal in July.

The original deal included an agreement with Russia to facilitate the export of Russian food and fertilizer products. However, Moscow repeatedly complained that this part of the deal was not honored, which Lavrov stressed again in his speech on Saturday.

A few weeks ago, Guterres was trying to make concessions to revive the deal, suggesting in a letter to Lavrov that Moscow could be reconnected to the international payments system SWIFT by creating a subsidiary of the Russian Agricultural Bank for certain payments.

Guterres’ letter also talked about unfreezing frozen assets of fertilizer companies in Europe and allowing Russian ships to enter European ports.