(Kyiv) Ukraine said on Monday it expects to resume its grain exports “as of this week”, for the first time since the start of the war, after the signing of an agreement with Moscow and despite the bombardment on Saturday by the Russian army from the great port of Odessa, vital for this trade.
Posted at 8:20 a.m.
Updated at 8:45 a.m.
“We expect the agreement to start working in the next few days and we expect a coordination center to be set up in Istanbul in the next few days. We are preparing everything to start this week,” Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov told a press conference.
According to him, the main obstacle to the resumption of exports is the risk of Russian bombing, as illustrated by the strike that targeted the port of Odessa on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine on Saturday.
Russia for its part defended its strikes on Odessa on Monday, saying they targeted military targets and did not hinder the resumption of Ukrainian grain exports.
Moscow claimed to have destroyed a warship in this port as well as missiles supplied by the United States.
The bombardments on Odessa “target only the military infrastructure. It is not at all related to the infrastructure used for the implementation of the agreement on grain exports,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
“That is why it cannot and should not interfere with the start of the loading process,” he added during his daily telephone briefing to the press.
Guarantee security
Oleksandre Kubrakov for his part called on the guarantors of the agreement, Turkey and the UN, to guarantee the safety of the Ukrainian convoys. “If the parties do not guarantee security, it will not work,” he warned.
Deputy Infrastructure Minister Yuri Vaskov said the port of Chornomorsk (southwest) will be the first to operate for exports, followed by that of Odessa, then that of Pivdenny (southwest) .
The agreement signed Friday in Istanbul between Moscow and Kyiv, under the aegis of the UN, provides for “secure corridors” for the circulation in the Black Sea of merchant ships.
It should make it possible to export 20 to 25 million tonnes of cereals blocked in Ukraine and to facilitate Russian agricultural exports, thus reducing the risk of a food crisis in the world where, according to the UN, 345 million people suffer from acute food insecurity.
Ukraine and Russia account for around 30% of world wheat exports and the war has led to a spike in cereal and oil prices, which has hit the African continent in particular hard.
The head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, is precisely leading an African tour to reassure the countries heavily dependent on Ukrainian cereals. He was in Congo on Monday, after meeting his Arab League partners in Cairo on Sunday.
PHOTO SERGEY BOBOK, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Rescuers search for survivors in the rubble of a building in Chuhuiv, Kharkiv region, on July 24, 2022.
No respite on the front
On the ground, the war, which entered its sixth month on Sunday, knows no respite on the fronts of Mykolaiv (south), in the Kharkiv region (northeast), the second largest city in Ukraine, in that of Kherson (south) and in the two pro-Russian separatist territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east.
The bombardments continued overnight from Sunday to Monday, according to the Ukrainian general staff.
In the Kherson region, largely occupied by Russian troops, the Ukrainians claim to be stepping up their counterattack.
“We can talk about a turnaround on the ground. During recent operations, it was the Ukrainian armed forces that had the advantage,” the adviser to the head of the regional military administration loyal to Kyiv, Sergiy Khlan, assured on Sunday.
“Our army is advancing frankly, we are moving from a defensive phase to a counter-offensive,” he added, promising that the region “will be definitively liberated by September and that all the plans of the occupiers will fail”.
The Russians captured Kherson on March 3, the first major Ukrainian city to fall into their hands since the launch of their offensive on February 24.
In this context, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on his compatriots on Sunday evening to “be united and work together for victory”, before “celebrating for the first time Ukraine Sovereignty Day, July 28”. .
His German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, for his part considered that the Russian war in Ukraine was also “a war against the unity of Europe”.
“We must not allow ourselves to be divided, we must not allow the great work of a united Europe that we have begun so promising to be destroyed”, he said.