After the Black Sea grain deal allowing for the export of Ukrainian and Russian grain and fertilizers was allowed to expire on Monday, Kiev has been struggling to find ways to get its product to market. One option was apparently to appeal to Ankara for help, but the NATO ally is unlikely to take such “a highly risky move,” according to an official familiar with the matter who spoke with a US newspaper on Tuesday.
The insider remark came after Dmitry Skornyakov, CEO of Ukraine’s HarvEast Holding, one of Ukraine’s largest agribiz corporations, said that “the main task for Ukraine now is to get the support of Turkiye.”
Indeed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan alongside United Nations leadership to extend the grain deal without Russia, asking Ankara and the UN to "ensure the work of the food corridor and the inspection of ships" themselves.
Zelensky has long pressed the NATO alliance to directly intervene in the 18-month-long conflict with Russia, an action that would bring four nuclear-armed powers into an open conflict with one another.
So far, the alliance has been hesitant to create such a situation, opting instead to funnel weapons to Kiev, effectively turning the Ukrainian Armed Forces into a NATO proxy force. A recent NATO summit in Lithuania earlier this month saw a furious Zelensky, explicitly rebuffed from joining the alliance during the present conflict, strongly criticize the Western powers.
Moscow elected to allow the deal to expire on Monday instead of renewing it because while Russia has ensured the safety of Ukrainian grain and fertilizer ships as they passed near the conflict zone, a similar effort to ensure the uninterrupted export of Russian products, particularly of fertilizers, by international partners has not been made.
On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dimitry Peskov said the UN has 90 days to normalize Russian agricultural exports in the wake of the grain deal’s collapse, including reconnecting the Russian state-owned agricultural bank Rosselkhozbank to the SWIFT bank wire service, before Moscow will cease attempting to revive the grain deal with Ukraine.