MOSCOW (March 20): Russia and the US will discuss ways to ensure safe shipping in the Black Sea at talks on a possible Ukrainian peace settlement in the Saudi city of Jeddah over coming days, the Kremlin said on Thursday.

After Russian forces made gains in 2024, President Donald Trump reversed US 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 US-Russian talks would take place on Sunday in Jeddah. But when asked by Reuters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said they might instead be early next week.

"We expect that negotiations will continue at the expert level and will continue in the coming days," Peskov said, adding that Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov had spoken to Mike Waltz, the US national security adviser, on Wednesday.

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 Ukraine 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 negotiation 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.

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