UNITED NATIONS, September 23. /TASS/. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has admitted that his proposals regarding the grain deal were an attempt to circumvent the anti-Russian sanctions rather than to have them removed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters on Saturday.

"He himself described his proposals as aimed not at securing some sort of an exemption from sanctions, but at finding a way of somehow not to violate them, to find some sort of a path," Lavrov said at a news conference to sum up the results of his work during the 78th UN General Assembly.

Commenting on the initiative to reconnect Rosselkhozbank to the SWIFT system via a branch in Luxembourg, Lavrov said that proposals that are being made envisage resuming the Ukrainian part of the deal tomorrow, while the Luxembourg branch is supposed to be reconnected to SWIFT in two months.

"First of all, this office does not even have a banking license. Secondly, it has remained idle and is now in the process of closure. This is an illustration of how profound the UN experts’ knowledge of the subject is."

The grain deal expired on July 17, 2023. Russia, which has extended the July 2022 agreement on the Black Sea corridor for ships carrying Ukrainian grain several times, recalled that the part of the deal that concerned Russia - the removal of obstacles to agricultural exports - had not been implemented. Moscow also pointed out that although the agreements were intended to send food to the poorest countries, most of Ukraine's grain went to developed Western countries. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia was ready to return to the agreement, but only if the part concerning Moscow was implemented.