by Tom Balmford
KYIV (Reuters) – Volodimir Zelensky said on Friday he would only accept a resumption of Russian ammonia exports through Ukraine in return for Russia releasing Ukrainian prisoners of war.
In an interview with Reuters, the Ukrainian president said he had offered the arrangement to the United Nations, which is advocating for a resumption of Russian ammonia exports via Ukraine to ease the global fertilizer shortage. Ammonia is used in the manufacture of fertilizers used in conventional agriculture.
“I am against delivering ammonia from the Russian Federation through our territory. I would only do it in exchange for our prisoners. This is what I proposed to the UN,” said Volodimir Zelensky in his presidential office.
Quoted by the Tass agency, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov immediately rejected this idea.
The UN has proposed that the ammonia belonging to the Russian agrochemical group Uralchem be transported by pipeline to the Ukrainian border, where it would be bought by the trader Trammo, based in the United States.
This gas pipeline was designed to transport up to 2.5 million tonnes of ammonia per year from the Russian Volga region to the Ukrainian port of Pivdennyi, called Yuzhne in Russian, near Odessa on the Black Sea.
It was closed after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 in what Moscow calls a “special military operation”.
Volodimir Zelensky said hundreds of Russian soldiers had been captured as part of the Ukrainian counter-offensive launched in early September in the Kharkiv region in the northeast of the country. He claimed, however, that Russia was holding more Ukrainian POWs.
The fate of these Ukrainian soldiers, especially those who were captured after resisting for months the Russian siege at the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, is a highly sensitive issue in Ukraine.
Some of their relatives were gathered on Friday near the Ukrainian presidency in Kyiv with signs calling for “Bring the heroes of Azovstal home”.
(Report, written by , French version Bertrand Boucey)