Russia will be ready to ship free grain to some of Africa’s poorest nations within the next three to four months, President Vladimir Putin has announced. He made the pledge during a speech at the Russia-Africa summit being held in St. Petersburg.
Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somali, the Central African Republic, and Eritrea will each receive 25,000 to 50,000 tons of grain, the Russian leader said. Moscow will also cover the delivery costs of the shipments, he added.
The announcement comes a week after Moscow refused to renew the Black Sea Grain Initiative, an arrangement which had allowed Ukraine to export grain by commercial ships. The UN- and Türkiye-mediated deal had been touted as a humanitarian effort to protect the world’s poorest nations from surging food prices.
However, Moscow has long insisted that the agreement had failed to achieve its purported aims and had turned into a purely commercial enterprise.
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