Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed the extension of the grain deal. He is quoted by TASS.
Terms of extension and other details are not given.
On the eve of March 17, the Permanent Representative of Kyiv to the UN, Sergei Kislitsa, called for an extension of the grain deal for the initially agreed 120 days, or for an indefinite period. Also he considers that action of the transaction needs to be extended to ports of the Nikolaev area.
Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya said that the Kremlin considered it expedient to extend the grain deal for 60 days instead of 120. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vershinin reported on March 14 that Russia had decided to extend the grain deal for only two months due to the lack of progress in the issue of Russian food supplies and fertilizers to world markets.
On the anniversary of the war, February 24, 2023, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said that he was grateful to Erdogan for his mediation efforts undertaken after the start of the war, including in organizing a "grain deal" and the exchange of captured fighters of the Azov regiment. Zelensky also said he had asked Erdogan to arrange for him to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin before the start of the war.
“I told him: put Putin at the negotiating table, the risk of a full-scale war cannot be allowed. But he couldn't do it, and not only him. Now he thinks he can. Now we can't. This [Putin] is not the same person. There is no one to talk to,” Zelensky stressed.
In August 2022, it became known that Russia had removed weapons and military equipment from Syria in July on the Sparta II merchant ship. As Bloomberg reported, citing sources, in this way the country circumvented the ban on the movement of warships through the Bosporus and Dardanelles, introduced by Turkey since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The ship carried at least 11 pieces of military equipment, according to sources, the Russian Federation has repeatedly used merchant ships to transport weapons and military equipment, bypassing the sanctions imposed by Turkey.
