Ukraine and Russia have agreed to a US-brokered halt to hostilities in the Black Sea, but the warring neighbours warned that Washington must play a key role to ensure the deal does not collapse.
The White House said on Tuesday that three days of talks in Saudi Arabia had yielded commitments from Ukraine and Russia “to ensure safe navigation, eliminate the use of force, and prevent the use of commercial vessels for military purposes in the Black Sea”.
The US said Kyiv and Moscow had also “agreed to develop measures for implementing [an] agreement to ban strikes against energy facilities”, after both sides accused each other of breaching pledges made earlier this month not to attack enemy power infrastructure.
However, after more than three years of all-out fighting in Europe’s biggest war since 1945, Ukraine and Russia each say the other cannot be trusted to keep their word and called on US president Donald Trump to ensure the nascent deals are upheld.
“If we see that someone is violating [the agreement], we believe we should turn through all our channels to the American side with facts and evidence that the Russian side has violated them,” said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“If the Russians violate this, then I have a direct question for President Trump. If they violate ... we ask for sanctions, we ask for weapons, etc,” he added.
In its announcement of the agreement, the Kremlin said it would only come into force if several steps were taken to lift sanctions on Russian companies, ships and financial institutions involved in exporting food and fertilisers.
“The United States will help restore access for Russian agricultural and fertiliser exports to the world market, reduce the cost of marine insurance, and expand access to ports and payment systems to conduct such transactions,” the Kremlin added.
[ Trump backs Waltz over Yemen security breachOpens in new window ]
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said: “We will need clear guarantees. And given the sad experience of agreements with Kyiv alone, the guarantees can only come from an order from Washington to Zelenskiy and his team to do one thing and not the other.”
It was not clear if a raft of EU sanctions on Russia would hamper implementation of the deal in the Kremlin’s eyes, and potentially lead to more friction between major European capitals and the US as Mr Trump pushes for an end to the war.
Kyiv, for its part, announced what it called an “important” condition that was not mentioned in the White House’s statement on the deal, which was reached after separate talks in Riyadh between US officials and Ukrainian and Russian delegations.
Ukrainian defence minister Rustem Umerov said “that all movement by Russia of its military vessels outside the eastern part of the Black Sea will constitute a violation of the spirit of this agreement ... a violation of the commitment to ensure safe navigation of the Black Sea and a threat to the national security of Ukraine. In this case, Ukraine will have the full right ... to self-defence”.
The US and Ukraine also said they would keep working together to “achieve the exchange of prisoners of war, the release of civilian detainees, and the return of forcibly transferred Ukrainian children”. Ukraine says Russia has illegally taken about 20,000 children to its territory, and tens of thousands of Ukrainian adults are also missing.
In their separate agreements with Washington, Kyiv and Moscow also both pledged to “continue working toward achieving a durable and lasting peace”.
It was not clear whether the deal prohibits attacks on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, such as Odesa and Mykolaiv, which come under Russian missile and drone strikes almost every night.
