San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
PUTIN VISITS OCCUPIED CRIMEA DAY AFTER ICC CALLS FOR ARREST
Ukraine, Russia agree to extend grain export deal
President Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit to occupied Crimea to mark the ninth anniversary of Russia’s illegal annexation of the peninsula, state media reported Saturday, a defiant gesture just one day after an international court issued a warrant for his arrest.
Putin had been scheduled to participate in ceremonies in Crimea via video link, but instead he traveled to the Black Sea port city of Sevastopol, local officials said. State media broadcast images of Putin, dressed in a cardigan, visiting a children’s art school and speaking with Mikhail Razvozhaev, governor of Sevastopol.
“On such a historic day, the president is always with Sevastopol and the people of Sevastopol,” Razvozhaev wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “Our country has an incredible leader.”
The visit signaled the Kremlin’s determination to continue with business as usual, less than 24 hours after the International Criminal Court accused Putin of war crimes and issued a warrant for his arrest. The court said he bore criminal responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children, thousands of whom have been sent to Russia since his fullscale invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago. Russian officials dismissed the court’s announcement as meaningless and vowed not to cooperate.
The images of Putin walking freely in Crimea — whose seizure by Russian troops in 2014 was a precursor to his full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February — and his decision to visit a children’s school illustrated how the warrant was unlikely to change his behavior, even if it punctured the aura of impunity that has surrounded him.
But Russia — which is scheduled to receive China’s leader, Xi Jinping, for a state visit beginning Monday — also agreed on Saturday to extend a deal allowing grain shipments to leave Ukraine, one of the few examples of cooperation between the warring parties since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The United Nations and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who helped broker the initial agreement, announced the last-minute extension of the deal, which lets Ukrainian grain ships pass through a Russian naval blockade in the Black Sea and has helped alleviate global food shortages and limit price increases.
The length of the extension remained unclear on Saturday. Ukraine’s infrastructure minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, initially said on Twitter that the deal had been extended for 120 days.
The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, however, said her country had only agreed to extend the deal for 60 days, according to the state news outlet Tass. A statement from the United Nations did not say how long it would last.
The grain deal had been set to expire later Saturday, and earlier in the week Russia had said it would agree to an extension of only 60 days because its own food and fertilizer exports were being hampered by sanctions. Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations pushed for a 120-day renewal, in line with the initial agreement in July and with a subsequent extension in November.
The deal allows ships carrying grain and fertilizer from Ukraine safe passage to Turkish waters, where they are inspected by a joint team of Turkish, U.N., Ukrainian and Russian officials.
“This agreement, which has provided the shipment of 25 million tons of grain to the world markets with more than 800 ships to date, is of vital importance for the stability of the global food supply,” Erdogan said on national television.
Ukraine is a leading exporter of wheat, barley, corn and sunflower, but its shipments plummeted after the war began. Exports from Russia, another major supplier, fell as well.
Talks on extending the deal began Monday in Geneva. Agreement on the previous extension, in November, was reached with days to spare.