Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Germany’s Johann Wadephul met in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday, in the first bilateral talks between the two countries’ top diplomats since before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The meeting put the faltering push to revive Black Sea grain and energy exports back on the diplomatic agenda — even as both sides emerged signalling that nothing substantive had moved.
A first meeting in four years
Relations between Moscow and Berlin, one of Ukraine’s closest allies, have been frozen since February 2022, and have deteriorated further in recent months. In a sign of how little warmth the UNGA encounter generated, Lavrov told a news conference that he had learned nothing new from his German counterpart that Berlin had not already said publicly.
“I told him that frankly … you could just have called me and said: ‘read my statement’,” Lavrov said, according to CNN. Still, officials from both sides said the ministers did discuss bilateral ties and the war in Ukraine.
Wadephul, for his part, notified his European allies of the meeting afterwards in a message seen by Reuters — an indication of how sensitive even a brief encounter with the Kremlin’s wartime foreign minister remains. In it he said he had used the talks to reiterate Europe’s position on Russia’s war of aggression and to call for “an immediate and complete cease-fire, most pressingly with a focus on grain exports, and the energy infrastructure.”
The grain corridor returns to the agenda
The most concrete subject on the table was the Black Sea. A German delegation source said Wadephul urged Lavrov to do “everything possible to reach an agreement on grain exports via the Black Sea,” arguing that “a pragmatic solution could pave the way for further concrete steps.” The meeting comes amid a wider diplomatic effort to revive the flow of grain and energy across the Black Sea, which has been sharply curtailed by attacks on vessels and port infrastructure on both sides.
“Time is of the essence: given the food shortages in many countries — particularly in the Global South — all parties must be willing to engage constructively,” Wadephul told Lavrov.
Lavrov countered that Moscow had already been in talks with India, Egypt and Turkey about proposals to ensure safe navigation in the Black Sea, potentially involving bilateral deals between Russia and those countries. But he struck a characteristically hard line toward Kyiv: “There is a need for separate discussions with the Ukrainians, and not in the language of requests, but rather demands,” he said, blaming Ukraine for the attacks on vessels. Ukraine, in turn, has said it remains open to agreements and blames all the fallout from the war on Russia and its invasion.
The Leipzig shadow over Berlin–Moscow ties
The talks took place against the backdrop of the August drone incident at Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany, which sharply escalated bilateral tensions. The German government said this month it had concluded that Russia was responsible for that attempted drone attack, and retaliated by closing a Russian consulate and a Russian cultural center in Berlin.
The Russian embassy in Berlin has dismissed the allegations as a “fabricated provocation” and a “new wave of anti-Russian hysteria in Germany.”
Wadephul used the UNGA meeting to call on Russia to “abandon the dangerous path of escalation vis-à-vis Germany, Europe, and NATO,” according to delegation sources. He added that incidents such as the attempted attack in Leipzig — or further hybrid attacks — would not shake Germany’s resolve to support Ukraine.
The meeting will not go down as a thaw. But after four years of silence between Moscow and Berlin, the fact that the two foreign ministers are speaking at all — and that Black Sea navigation, grain exports and hybrid escalation are on their table — marks a tentative, fragile crack in one of Europe’s deepest diplomatic freezes.