Russia Pulls Back From Humanitarian Cooperation at U.N.

Russia is poised to end its cooperation at the United Nations in key humanitarian areas as the Kremlin faces a difficult fight in Ukraine and is eager to shore up support at home amid recent domestic instability, Western officials said.

In recent weeks, Russia has pushed for the removal of a U.N. peacekeeping mission from Mali, blocked a critical U.N. aid supply line for Syria, and is now threatening to end an agreement that allowed Ukraine to resume its Black Sea grain exports, officials say.

Moscow’s renewed efforts at bare-knuckle diplomacy at the U.N. come as Russia is facing a war in Ukraine with no end in sight and weeks after an armed insurrection by the Wagner group, which posed the most serious challenge in more than a decade to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power.

“Among the Russian elite and the Russian people at large, it is considered that the government is making too many concessions, that they’re not getting too much in return,” said Dimitri Simes, an analyst of U.S.-Russian relations, referring to the grain deal, which is set to end Monday.

Signed in Istanbul in July last year, the Black Sea Grain Initiative is one of the few diplomatic breakthroughs of the war, allowing Ukraine to export more than 32 million tons of wheat, corn, sunflower oil and other goods around the world. The deal opened a special maritime corridor in the Black Sea for both commercial ships and charter vessels that the U.N. uses to ship Ukrainian grain to crisis-stricken countries such as Sudan, Yemen and Somalia.

The Turkish government, which along with the U.N. helped broker the initial deal, has played a central role in keeping Russia from breaking with the agreement over the past year, U.S. officials and Western diplomats say. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has expressed a renewed willingness to cooperate with the West in recent weeks, agreeing to green-light Sweden’s entrance to NATO after a yearlong standoff.

Erdogan said on Friday that he and Putin were on the “same page” regarding an extension of the deal, without elaborating. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Moscow is still weighing the issue. 

“If Moscow follows through on its threat, developing countries including in the region will pay the price including quite literally with higher food prices as well as greater food scarcity,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a gathering Friday in Jakarta, Indonesia. 

Russia has threatened to cancel the deal in the past and briefly suspended its cooperation with the accord last October after a Ukrainian attack on its forces in Crimea. Ukrainian and U.S. officials say they are concerned that Russia is increasingly willing to back out of the agreement because of Putin’s growing international isolation and domestic instability.

A U.S. official said the Kremlin may be evaluating the shifting costs and benefits to the grain deal, with concerns mounting that putting pressure on Ukraine economically could outweigh the diplomatic repercussions of ending the deal, especially at a time of domestic uncertainty in Russia.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres wrote to Putin this past week proposing a continuation of Ukraine’s grain exports in return for reconnecting a subsidiary of Russia’s agricultural bank to the Swift international payments system. 

In New York, Russia has for decades used its influence as one of the five veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council to heap pressure on the West and other opponents, but diplomats and analysts say Putin now appears unusually willing to break with past agreements such as the grain deal and the Syrian aid lifeline.

“Russia has gone from a posture of grumpy accommodation to all-out obstructionism,” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit that monitors conflicts.

Russia’s mission to the U.N. didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Russia on July 11 vetoed a resolution at the U.N. Security Council needed for humanitarian groups to supply food, water and medicine to more than four million people living in rebel-held Syria. Russia signaled it is unwilling to negotiate a compromise on the issue, urging the U.N. to instead accept a Syrian government proposal for it to take control over aid deliveries from Turkey.

If the U.N. accepts the proposal, it would effectively bring to an end a nearly decadelong effort through which the international body has been able to bring aid to rebel-held parts of Syria without seeking Damascus’s approval. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has long sought to strangle off food and other supplies to opposition-controlled areas of the country, seeking to deprive the rebels of popular support.

Putin is “reminding the world that he can set the world on fire if he wants to,” said Natasha Hall, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Write to Jared Malsin at [email protected] and William Mauldin at [email protected]