Russia and US to discuss Black Sea shipping on Monday

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russian and U.S. experts will discuss ways to ensure the safety of shipping in the Black Sea at talks on a possible Ukrainian peace settlement in Riyadh on Monday, the Kremlin said.

After Russian forces made gains in 2024, President Donald Trump reversed U.S. policy on the war, launching bilateral talks with Moscow and suspending military assistance to Ukraine, demanding that it take steps to end the conflict.

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff earlier this week said U.S.-Russian talks would take place on Sunday in Jeddah. President Vladimir Putin's foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, said talks would take place on Monday in Riyadh.

The talks will be "mainly to study the prospects for the possible implementation of a well-known initiative related to the safety of navigation in the Black Sea," Ushakov said in a statement.

The talks will be bilateral, Ushakov said.

Russia will be represented by Grigory Karasin, a former diplomat who is now chair of the Federation Council's Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sergei Beseda, an adviser to the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB).

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that when Putin and Trump spoke by telephone on Tuesday, they had discussed the "Black Sea Initiative".

Turkey and the United Nations helped mediate the so-called Black Sea Grain Initiative, a deal struck in July 2022 that allowed the safe export of nearly 33 million metric tons of Ukrainian grain across the Black Sea despite the war.

Russia withdrew from the agreement after a year, complaining that its own food and fertiliser exports faced serious obstacles.

"We fulfilled all the conditions then, but the conditions in relation to us were not fulfilled," Peskov said.

The White House, in its March 18 statement on the Putin-Trump call, said the leaders agreed to technical negotiations on the implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, a full ceasefire and permanent peace. 

The World Bank's global commodities outlook from April 2024 says that despite the Black Sea shipping risks, both Russia and Ukraine were shipping grain to global markets without major problems. It also said the collapse of the Black Sea Grain Initiative had a minimal fallout. 

The bank's latest report from October 2024 does not mention Black Sea shipping risks.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 has left hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, displaced millions of people, reduced towns to rubble and triggered the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West in six decades.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a Russia-friendly president was toppled in Ukraine's Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces then fighting Ukraine's armed forces in the east.

(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge, Mark Trevelyan and Toby Chopra)