by Aziz El Yaakoubi, Pavel Polityuk and Jonathan Saul
RIYADH (Reuters) – Russian and Ukrainian officials met last week in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to discuss the possibility of a prisoner swap allowing a resumption of ammonia exports from Russia to Asia and the United Arab Emirates. Africa via a gas pipeline in Ukraine, we learned from three sources informed of the holding of this meeting.
These talks took place under the mediation of the Emirates and without the participation of the United Nations despite the central role played by the organization in the creation of maritime corridors allowing the export of agricultural products from three Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, the sources said.
The talks on Russian ammonia, however, aim to remove the remaining hurdles to complete the grain deal, reached in July and extended for four months last week, and to ease the global shortage of certain food products by unblocking exports as well Ukrainians than Russians, they added.
Ammonia is used in the manufacture of fertilizers used in conventional agriculture.
Russian and Ukrainian emissaries traveled to Abu Dhabi, capital of the Emirates, on November 17, where they discussed a resumption of Russian ammonia exports conditional on a large exchange of prisoners, the sources said.
Reuters could not immediately determine whether those talks resulted in any progress.
The foreign ministries of the UAE, Russia and Ukraine and the Russian and Ukrainian defense ministries did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Asked about the involvement or not of the UN in these discussions, a spokesman for the organization refused to speak.
ZELENSKY LAID DOWN CONDITIONS
The proposed project would see Russian ammonia flow through an existing gas pipeline, designed to transport up to 2.5 million tonnes of ammonia per year from Russia’s Volga region to the Ukrainian port of Pivdennyi, called Yuzhne in Russian, near Odessa on the Black Sea, where it would be loaded onto ships bound for international customers.
This gas pipeline was closed after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 in what Moscow calls a “special military operation”.
Ammonia exports are not affected by the extension of the maritime corridors agreement from Ukrainian Black Sea ports.
Rebeca Grynspan, secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and mediator in the fertilizer negotiations, expressed her optimism last week that Russia and Ukraine could strike a deal on Russian ammonia exports through this pipeline. She did not specify the reasons for her optimism.
Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky has publicly set several conditions for the resumption of Russian ammonia exports through his country, including an exchange of prisoners and the reopening of the port of Mykolaiv.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine has released official figures on the number of prisoners taken since the start of the conflict. Volodimir Zelensky said on October 29 that Russia had released 1,031 since March.
Denis Pushilin, pro-Russian leader of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, said Russia and Ukraine would exchange 50 prisoners each on Thursday.
Russia and Ukraine have barely provided any information about their possible direct talks since ceasefire talks broke down in the first weeks of the Russian invasion.
The efforts of the Emirates are part of the continuity of the mediation undertaken by Saudi Arabia, which recorded a diplomatic success in September by obtaining the release by Russia of foreign fighters captured in Ukraine.
Like Arabia, the Emirates are part of the OPEC+ oil cartel in which Russia participates. They maintained good relations with Moscow despite Western pressure.
Their chairman, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, visited Moscow last month where he discussed with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin the possibility of Emirati mediation over Russian ammonia, two of the sources said.
(Report Aziz El Yaakoubi in Ryad, Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv and Jonathan Saul in London, with Jonathan Spicer, French version Bertrand Boucey, edited by Sophie Louet)