OREANDA-NEWS  The representative of the EU Foreign Policy Service, Peter Stano, said that Brussels is calling on Russia to return to participation in the Black Sea grain initiative, but did not comment on the EU's readiness to facilitate Russian agricultural exports.

"We call on Russia... to return to the grain initiative," he said.

Earlier, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres sent a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a proposal to resume the grain deal. It is supposed to "summarize previous UN ideas that have not worked." The UN has not received an official response from the Russian side to Guterres' letter, in which he put forward proposals for the resumption of the Black Sea initiative, Secretary General's spokesman Stephane Dujarric said at a briefing.
In turn, Lavrov said that Russia would immediately return to the grain deal as soon as all the points of the RF-UN memorandum were fulfilled, while Guterres' new proposals contained promises, but not guarantees of this. Lavrov also said that the UN Secretary General spoke about his new initiatives on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg at the end of August.

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he intends to discuss this issue during talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.