Russia and Ukraine have signed an agreement in Istanbul on Friday to unblock more than 20 million tons of grain stuck in blockaded Black Sea ports in Ukraine.
The deal is aimed at bringing down soaring grain prices and alleviating a mounting global hunger crisis, The New York Times reports.
This is coming after months of talks between the two warring countries, which was brokered with the help of the United Nations and Turkey.
Senior United Nations officials said that the first shipments of grain out of Odesa and neighboring ports were mere weeks away and would quickly bring five million metric tons of Ukrainian grain and other foodstuffs to the world market per month.
The development would also free up storage space in Ukraine’s silos for freshly harvested grain, the officials added.
The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said at the signing ceremony in Istanbul on Friday, “This agreement did not come easy,” calling the deal a “beacon in the Black Sea.”
He, however, commended Ukraine, Russia and Turkey for working together to secure the breakthrough.
“Since the war started, I have been highlighting that there is no solution to the global food crisis without ensuring full global access to Ukraine’s food products and Russian food and fertilizer.
“Today we took important steps to achieve this objective. But it has been a long road,” he said.
No substantial agreement was reached between Kyiv and Moscow, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24.
Series of negotiations were held in Belarus that month and in March but they were all not successful as Russia insisted on a change of government in Kyiv.
The New York Times added that negotiators have been able to reach agreements about evacuating a steel plant in Mariupol where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians were holed up for 80 days.
Both sides have also agreed on several occasions to exchange prisoners and the corpses of dead soldiers. But this is the first time that representatives from both countries have publicly signed an agreement in a signing ceremony.
