An agreement to unlock the grain exports blockeds in Ukrainian ports will be signed this Friday, in Istanbul, the Turkish Presidency announced in a statement on Thursday.
“The signing ceremony of the grain shipment agreement, in which the (Turkish) president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, will be present, will take place this Friday at 4:30 p.m. in the Office of Dolmabahçe, with the participation of Ukraine and Russia,” says the brief note.
The Turkish government’s announcement came shortly after the UN reported that Guterres had interrupted his vacation to travel to Istanbul in the next few hours, where he was already last week to participate in the negotiations on grains blocked by the war in Ukraine. .
Guterres “travels to Istanbul as part of his efforts to ensure full global access to Ukrainian food and to Russian food and fertilizer,” UN spokesman Farhan Haq said in New York.
Following the “four-way meeting” with military representatives from Russia, Ukraine and Turkey, which took place last week, Guterres was cautiously optimistic and spoke of “a key step forward” and “a ray of light”.
On Monday, the Turkish Defense Minister, Hulisi Akar, considered a new meeting this week “likely”, but without giving signs that a definitive agreement was close to being sealed.
He then noted that “the establishment of an operations center in Istanbuljoint controls at the ports of departure and destination, and the guarantee of the safety of navigation on the transfer routes are the main technical issues” that were addressed in the ongoing diplomatic contacts.
According to Haq, along with Guterres, the Deputy Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffith, and the Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad), Rebeca Grynspan, are now traveling to Istanbul.
It is estimated that in Ukrainian ports currently have more than 20 million tons of cereals and sunflower seeds that cannot reach the market as a consequence of the blockade of the Black Sea after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The lack of these grains in international markets threatens a food crisis and famine.