The United States said Tuesday an agreement was reached to ensure safe navigation in the Black Sea as it wrapped up three days of talks with Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Saudi Arabia on prospective steps toward a limited ceasefire.
While a comprehensive peace deal still looks distant, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised the talks as the early “right steps” toward a peaceful settlement of the all-out war that recently entered its fourth year.
“These are the first steps — not the very first but initial ones — with this presidential administration toward completely ending the war and the possibility of a full ceasefire, as well as steps toward a sustainable and fair peace agreement,” he said at a news conference.
U.S. experts met separately with Ukrainian and Russian representatives in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, and the White House said in separate statements after the talks with Ukraine and Russia that the sides have “agreed to ensure safe navigation, eliminate the use of force, and prevent the use of commercial vessels for military purposes in the Black Sea.”
Details of the prospective deal are yet to be released, but it appears to mark another attempt to ensure safe Black Sea shipping after a 2022 agreement that was brokered by the UNÂ and Turkey but halted by Russia the next year.
When Moscow withdrew from that deal in 2023, it complained that a parallel agreement promising to remove obstacles to Russian exports of food and fertilizer hadn’t been honoured. It said restrictions on shipping and insurance hampered its agricultural trade. Kyiv accused Moscow of violating the deal by delaying the vessels’ inspections. After Russia suspended its part of the deal, it regularly attacked Ukraine’s southern ports and grain storage sites.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in televised comments Tuesday that Moscow is now open to the revival of the Black Sea shipping deal but warned that Russian interests must be protected.
In an apparent reference to Moscow’s demands, the White House 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.”
Russia wants sanctions eased
The Kremlin warned in a statement the Black Sea deal could only be implemented after sanctions against Rosselkhozbank and other financial organizations involved in food and fertilizer trade are lifted and their access to the SWIFT system of international payments is ensured.
It’s also conditional on lifting the sanctions against Russian food and fertilizer exporters, and on removing restrictions on exports of agricultural equipment to Russia, the Kremlin said. It also emphasized that inspections of commercial ships would be necessary to ensure they aren’t used for military purposes.
Zelenskyy bristled at Russia’s demand for lifting sanctions, saying, “We believe that it would weaken our position.”
Get the latest on CBCNews.ca, the CBC News App, and CBC News Network for breaking news and analysis
A senior official in the Ukrainian government, who is directly familiar with the talks and spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said the Kyiv delegation does not agree to lifting sanctions as a condition for a maritime ceasefire and that Russia has done nothing to warrant a sanctions rollback.
The official also said European countries are not involved in the sanctions discussions, despite sanctions being within the European Union’s responsibility.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov warned that Kyiv would see the deployment of Russian warships in the western Black Sea as a “violation of the commitment to ensure safe navigation in the Black Sea and a threat to the national security of Ukraine.”
“In this case, Ukraine will have full right to exercise right to self-defence,” he said.
Halting energy infrastructure strikes
The White House also said the parties agreed to develop measures for implementing an agreement reached in U.S. President Donald Trump’s calls with Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin to ban strikes against energy facilities in Russia and Ukraine.
The talks in Riyadh, which did not include direct Russian-Ukrainian contact, were part of an attempt to hammer out details on a partial pause in the fighting in Ukraine, which began with Moscow’s invasion in 2022.Â
It has been a struggle to reach even a limited, 30-day ceasefire — which both sides agreed to in principle last week, even while continuing to attack each other with drones and missiles.
After the Trump-Putin call last week, the White House said the partial ceasefire would include ending attacks on “energy and infrastructure,” while the Kremlin emphasized that the agreement referred more narrowly to “energy infrastructure.” Tuesday’s White House statement reverted to the wording used by Russia.
Zelenskyy noted that significant uncertainties remain.
“I think there will be a million questions and details,” he said, adding that the responsibility for potential violations also remains unclear.
He emphasized that Ukraine is open to a full, 30-day ceasefire that Trump has proposed, reaffirming that Kyiv is “ready to quickly move toward an unconditional ceasefire.”
Putin has made a complete ceasefire conditional on a halt of arms supplies to Kyiv and a suspension of Ukraine’s military mobilization — demands rejected by Ukraine and its Western allies.
The U.S. noted its commitment to helping achieve the exchange of prisoners of war, the release of civilian detainees, and the return of forcibly transferred Ukrainian children.
Umerov, the Ukrainian defence minister, emphasized the need for additional technical consultations as soon as possible to agree on all the details and aspects of the implementation, monitoring and control of the agreements.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters “there is an understanding that the contacts will continue, but there is nothing concrete at the moment.”
Senior Russian lawmaker Grigory Karasin, who took part in the Russia-U.S. talks in Riyadh on Monday, told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti that the conversation was “very interesting, difficult, but quite constructive.”
“We were at it all day from morning until late at night,” Karasin was quoted by the agency as saying.
