The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, José Manuel Albares, yesterday condemned the missile attack on the Ukrainian port of Odessa, one of the three designated for the export of grain under the agreement signed on Friday between Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the UN.
“Preventing the exit of Ukrainian grain is unacceptable and represents a threat to world food security,” the head of Spanish diplomacy said in a post on his Twitter profile.
Albares stressed that “the agreements to unblock Ukrainian grain, thanks to the UN and Turkey, must be respected”.
According to the Ukrainian authorities, four missiles were launched against the port yesterday. One of them hit the commercial zone, while two others were intercepted by the Ukrainian air defence system. The fourth missile is said to have hit another area of the port, in an attack described by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as “a spit in the face of UN Secretary General António Guterres and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by Vladimir Putin”.
For their part, the Russian authorities denied their involvement in the attack on the Ukrainian port, according to Turkey’s defence minister, Hukusi Akar, who acknowledged that the incident was of a “worrying nature” given that his country is the guarantor of a pact that makes Odessa and two other ports in the country safe zones for the export of grain.
In this regard, Ukraine’s infrastructure minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, assured that Ukraine will continue to comply with the terms of the Istanbul pact, for its part.
