MOSCOW, March 20. /TASS/. Russian vessels engaged in shipping agricultural products and fertilizers are coming under serious pressure, hampering their ability to operate day to day, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin said on Monday.

"Our exports, our vessels shipping Russian agricultural products and fertilizers are coming under very serious pressure, which is hampering their work," he said.

"After all, this is about carrying out specific transactions, and transactions that must be paid for," he noted. "And if it turns out to be impossible to make such payments, whatever may be said about the necessity of ensuring global food security, such words simply come across as hypocritical."

He stressed that the Russian side deems the West’s sanctions as being illegitimate. "They were imposed by countries known to all. Calls for their implementation and very strong pressure for all parties to comply with them are coming from both Washington and Brussels, but we believe that there is a wide chasm of hypocrisy between the statements that we’re hearing <…> and the real state of affairs," Vershinin added.