NEW YORK — The two most important foreign ministers in Europe held their first face-to-face talks since 2022 on Saturday, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, and according to German officials, the central ask of the hour-long meeting was to “do everything possible to reach an agreement on grain exports via the Black Sea.” That is, in the diplomatic vocabulary of the autumn, the most loaded sentence in the building.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, met in the kind of glass-walled UN corridor where four generations of back-channel negotiations have happened and none of them produced a single signed document. The meeting was the first at foreign-minister level since before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a fact that both delegations acknowledged, and then discussed at some length. Per the same German delegation source, the central ask was for Lavrov to “do everything possible to reach an agreement on grain exports via the Black Sea,” a phrase reported by CNN that carried, on its face, the entire weight of the meeting.

"Russia has to understand that we are ready to resist and to defend ourselves," Wadephul said, in an interview with ARD released around the same hour, which gave the grain ask a tone rather more specific than "please."

The grain request is, on the surface, a logistics question: Ukrainian wheat, corn, and sunflower oil have been routed around the Black Sea for years at enormous cost, and the war has made the waterway itself a negotiable asset. A German delegation source told reporters that several “Global South” countries had separately asked Berlin to put the grain question directly on the table with Moscow, which is, diplomatically, a strong statement from people who would rather not have to be explicit.

THE MEETING, PER THE DELEGATIONS

  • First bilateral foreign-minister talks since 2022
  • Location: a UN corridor with glass walls and a view of nothing in particular
  • Central ask: a Black Sea grain shipping agreement
  • Supporting ask: "Russia has to understand"
  • Documented outcome: both delegations agree the talks were important
  • Documented outcome, second edition: see above

Lavrov, for his part, confirmed the meeting happened, confirmed it was productive, and confirmed, on the record, that Russia is “open to discussions,” which is the diplomatic equivalent of a door being ajar at a distance of about nine hundred miles. The two men shook hands for photographs. The photographs are now in circulation.

At press time, no follow-up meeting had been scheduled, no joint statement had been drafted, and both delegations had returned to their respective hotels in New York, where they were, according to a source familiar with the arrangements, “reviewing the notes.” The notes, according to the same source, were two pages long. The grain ask was on both of them.