The U.S. said Russia and Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire in the Black Sea, even as the Kremlin said its involvement would depend on a series of preconditions including sanctions relief.
In separate statements, the White House said Tuesday that three days of technical-level talks in Saudi Arabia with teams from Russia and Ukraine had yielded agreements “to ensure safe navigation” in the Black Sea. The sides had also agreed to prevent the use of commercial shipping for military purposes, it said.
The U.S. “will help restore Russia’s access to the world market for agricultural and fertilizer exports, lower maritime insurance costs, and enhance access to ports and payment systems for such transactions,” according to the White House.
The Kremlin confirmed the agreement on the Black Sea late Tuesday, but said it was conditional on lifting sanctions on banks and companies involved in agricultural exports.
The truce would come into force once restrictions were removed from the Russian Agricultural Bank, Rosselkhozbank JSC, and other financial institutions involved in trade in food products and fertilizers, including by connecting them to the SWIFT international payments system, it said in a statement.
The pushback came as Russia faces only limited barriers to sales of its food and fertilizers abroad. It ranks as the world’s biggest wheat exporter, accounting for more than a fifth of global trade.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his forces would observe the partial truce immediately.
The U.S. said Moscow and Kyiv also agreed to work out mechanisms for implementing their ban on strikes against energy infrastructure. The moratorium took effect from March 18 for 30 days, according to the Kremlin statement.
While the talks in the Saudi capital Riyadh yielded a second area of agreement to end hostilities, they also underlined the difficulty of reaching a full ceasefire in the war that Russia began with its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
That may reinforce a sense that Russia is playing for time to try to extract more concessions from the White House as President Donald Trump seeks to fulfill his election campaign pledge to achieve a quick end to the conflict.
“Putin feels confident and thinks that he has the upper hand,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “By prolonging negotiations and expanding the agenda, the Kremlin appears to be setting conditions for future talks.”
Zelenskyy said another round of talks between the U.S. and Ukraine may take place soon. But the statements made no mention of possible future talks or a summit meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine has remained a significant crop exporter and ships substantial volumes via the Black Sea, despite Russia’s withdrawal from a United Nations-backed grain deal covering the route in 2023. Kyiv’s forces have also driven the Russian navy out of the western part of the Black Sea by sinking many of its vessels.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who took part in the talks, said in a Facebook post that any movement of Russian military vessels outside of the eastern part of the Black Sea would be regarded as a violation of the commitment to ensure safe navigation and a threat to Ukraine’s national security.
Speaking to reporters in Riyadh on Tuesday, Umerov called the meeting productive and expressed confidence the U.S. would help to enforce it. “America has sticks and carrots enough to ensure compliance with all the agreements,” he said.
Trump administration officials are aiming to reach a full ceasefire as soon as April 20, Bloomberg reported previously, but that timeline has been seen by Ukrainian and European officials as overly ambitious.
Russia and Ukraine may see a greater incentive to prolong the three-year conflict instead of rushing into a full settlement, an assessment by the U.S. intelligence community released on Tuesday showed.
Productive and focused
The statements came after the Kremlin earlier Tuesday said that it wouldn’t disclose details of the 12 hours of negotiations between Russian and U.S. officials in Riyadh. U.S. and Ukrainian officials also held a second round of talks on Tuesday, following discussions on Sunday that Umerov had called “productive and focused.”
The meetings followed Trump’s separate phone calls last week with Putin and Zelenskyy, where he secured their agreement to the 30-day truce covering energy infrastructure.
The White House statement said the U.S. “remains committed to helping achieve the exchange of prisoners of war, the release of civilian detainees, and the return of forcibly transferred Ukrainian children.”
The Russia- U.S. dialogue was difficult but constructive and covered many issues, Grigory Karasin, a former deputy foreign minister who jointly led the Kremlin’s negotiating team, said Tuesday, according to the Tass news service. Talks will continue and involve the U.N. as well as other countries, he said.
Turkey and the U.N. mediated talks on a grain-export deal from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in 2022-2023 that collapsed when Russia withdrew.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine unconditionally supports the idea of a full ceasefire.
“We show that we want to end the war,” the president told reporters in Kyiv on Tuesday. “When Russians start to wriggle about that they don’t want a full ceasefire, but a partial one, and not here but there, it shows who really wants to prolong the war.”
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(With assistance from Matthew Martin, Ilya Arkhipov, Aliaksandr Kudrytski, Daryna Krasnolutska, Megan Durisin and Alberto Nardelli.)
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