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Michael Robinson Chávez/The Washington Post A field of young wheat in Uman, Ukraine.
The Washington Post
11:35 JST, March 26, 2025
The United States agreed Tuesday to help Russia sell its grain and fertilizer on the world market – a move that was quickly criticized in Kyiv as a unilateral concession on a long-standing Kremlin demand.
The grain deal was announced in a U.S. statement on negotiations with Russia regarding a U.S.-brokered framework between Russia and Ukraine to expand a limited ceasefire to include the Black Sea, as the Trump administration pushes for a more comprehensive deal.
In later public statements, the Kremlin said the grain and fertilizer agreement would need to include relief from Western economic sanctions. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv was not consulted on the proposal and would not support it.
“It’s a concession,” Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former economy minister in Ukraine who heads the Kyiv School of Economics, said after the announcement. “But [it is] unclear for what.”
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow has claimed that it has struggled to access export markets for its agricultural goods. 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.
Agricultural experts said they were confused by the latest proposal, noting that while a prior agreement on shipping through the Black Sea had broken down in 2023, both Ukraine and Russia had been able to find ways to export their grain since then.
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 with just 42 million in 2021-2022.
“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.
In a later phone call, however, Sizov emphasized that the U.S. proposal was so vague, it was “hard to know if it was an actual concession.”
He added that some key aspects of sanctions relief, such as the reconnection of Rosselkhozbank to the Brussels-based SWIFT financial messaging system, would require cooperation with European allies.
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.
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. 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.
“Oral bilateral agreements can only be considered as the first step towards achieving a binding trilateral agreement,” said Nikolai Petrov, an expert with the New Eurasian Strategies Center, a think tank founded by Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
The talks in Riyadh over recent days came less than two years after Moscow unilaterally withdrew from an agreement to allow Black Sea grain exports from Ukraine, claiming that its 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 Tuesday, Russia’s top diplomat said 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.”
While global food prices spiked in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they have remained far lower in the years since then, according to U.N. statistics. Sizov said he thought it was unlikely that the U.S. proposal on Tuesday would affect global prices.
“Wheat prices are already 30 percent lower than they were before the war, despite the lack of a ceasefire, lack of a grain deal,” he said.
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.
