Ukraine offered Turkey and the UN to expand the grain agreement to other types of cargo
Ukraine has proposed expanding the Black Sea Grain Export Agreement to include more ports and goods, hoping that a decision will be made next week to extend the agreement for at least a year. "We hope that no later than next week we will have an understanding from our partners - Turkey and the UN, and the entire market will also have a clear signal regarding the further functioning and continuation of the initiative," Vaskov said. As Reuters writes, the official also informed that Ukraine will offerurged Turkey and the UN to extend the agreement for at least one year, as well as to extend its effect to the ports of the Mykolaiv region, which before the Russian invasion provided 35% of Ukrainian food exports. The Ukrainian side also demanded to streamline the mandatory inspection of ships transporting food as part of the grain initiative, as Russia deliberately slows down inspections in order to reduce the speed of exports, noted Yurii Vaskov. "We demand to streamline inspections or cancel them, because it is senseless. Or increase the number of inspection teams," said the deputy minister. He noted that the inspectors of the Joint Center, which oversees the agreement, conducted only 12 inspections per day, while 25-30 inspections were needed. "When Turkey and the UN conducted their own inspections, they proved that it is possible to conduct more than 40 inspections per day. Now that Russia has returned... we again have a total of 12 inspections per day," stated the Ukrainian official. "They do not explain (the reason for the delays ), but they do not hide that they are doing it in order to complicate the work of the corridor." Vaskov noted that neither the UN nor Turkey informed Kyiv about the conditions put forward by Russia for the extension of the agreement. Also, according to him, there has not been a single request from Russia for the arrival of ships that would plan to transport ammonia from Ukrainian ports. It will be recalled that on the eve of the Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said that he will offer to extend the agreement on the grain corridor in the Black Sea for another year. Ukrainian experts and market participants have already repeatedly proposed to extend the effect of the grain agreement to other groups of goods, in particular, to the production of MMC. "From the point of view of the economy of Ukraine, sending HMC cargo has the same effect as agricultural cargo. 80% of HMC cargo is exported, more than 70% of which went through ports. We expected that from the very beginning the transport corridor would extend to HMC as well In the structure of exports, our products occupy more than a third, and last year Ukraine received more than USD 22 billion in foreign exchange earnings for them," noted Oleksandr Kalenkov, president of Ukrmetallurgprom.