Russian president meets African Union president to discuss food crisis sparking war
Top Russian leader Vladimir Putin met this Thursday in the spa town of Sochi, on the Black Sea coast, with the African Union president, Senegalese Macky Sall, to talk about the food crisis that the war is causing in Ukraine, whose blocked ports prevent the export of grain. According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, Putin told Sall, who was present in the company of African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat, that the mistake of the grain not reaching the recipients, at Kiev and the West, not Moscow.
And this is despite the fact that Russia has taken over much of Ukraine’s southern coast and its warships control access to Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea. Before the meeting in Sochi, Peskov announced that African leaders will receive “exhaustive explanations from the Russian president about his views on grain from Ukraine”. “They will find out what is happening there, who is mining the ports, what it takes to move the grain and that Russia is not blocking those ports.”
In any case, at the beginning of talks this Friday in Sochi and after a brief introduction by Putin, Sall said Africa is a “victim” of the war in Ukraine. In his words, “I am here to ask you to be aware that our countries are victims of these crises” and emphasized that “most African countries, however, avoided condemning Russia” for unleashing the war in Ukraine during the two votes taken at the UN. The president of the AU, which in turn is Senegal, said he feared a “hurricane of famine” on the African continent, which gets more than half of the wheat it consumes from Ukraine and Russia.
According to Sall, the sanctions have affected Russia’s logistical, commercial and financial chain, leading to African countries being “deprived of the grains coming from Russia and their fertilizers”. The African dignitary expressed a wish that the food sector remain out of sanctions, “particularly grains and fertilizers,” he added.
Russia and Ukraine account for nearly a third of the global wheat supply, while Russia is also a major global exporter of fertilizers and Ukraine a major exporter of corn and sunflower oil. In separate telephone interviews last week with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Putin demanded the lifting of sanctions and the cessation of military aid to Ukraine as measures for his country to curb grain exports. resume and allow Ukraine’s by unblocking the ports. Kiev has described such calls as “blackmail”.
The Russian president told Sall on Friday that “our country has always been on the side of Africa, always supporting Africa in its fight against colonialism, and I am very pleased to note that in 2019, here in Sochi, the Russia- Africa He stressed that in this new phase we “attach great importance to our relations with African countries”.
In his opinion: “Africa’s role on the international stage is growing, in general, politically. We believe that Africa as a whole and its individual states, with whom we traditionally have very good, no exaggeration, friendly relations, all of Africa as a whole has great prospects, and it is precisely on this basis that we intend to further develop our relations with Africa as a whole.
Next week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will visit Turkey as part of efforts to devise a plan to unblock Ukraine’s grain exports through the participation of Turkish escort ships. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, more than 20 million tons of grain have accumulated in the country’s silos. The first consequence is an unprecedented worldwide rise in grain and fertilizer prices.
Even the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, has said he is willing to facilitate the transit of Ukrainian grain to the ports of Poland, Germany and the three Baltic republics, but in exchange for the lifting of sanctions by these countries and allowing of the transfer of Belarusian goods using those same ports.
Source: La Verdad
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