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Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have declared open season on Ukraine’s consequent grain exports, targeting the port city of Odesa with new ferocity and putting food prices at risk around the world.
With strikes in Odesa, Putin says he wants to reverse the damage to almost one 12-mile bridge connecting annexed Crimea to the Russian mainland.
But they also coincide with Russia’s withdrawal from a one-year deal known as the Black Sea Grain Initiative to keep Ukrainian grain flowing to the world.
RELATED: Wheat prices rise as Russia-Ukraine tensions rise
Although Russia’s food exports are supposed to be exempt from Western sanctions, Russia has cited obstacles to its own exports as a reason for withdrawing from the Ukraine grain deal.
The attacks in Odesa, meanwhile, lit up the night sky on Monday and Tuesday and targeted the city’s port, a key piece of infrastructure where Russia had allowed grain to be exported as part of the deal negotiated in last July by the United Nations and Turkey.
Russia, by the way, was already fretting over Turkey’s decision to allow Sweden into NATO, apparently along with US promises to allow Turkey to buy F-16 fighter jets.
Then Ukraine claimed credit for damages to the bridge on Monday, just when the future of the cereal deal was called into question.
On Tuesday, United States Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power visited Odesa to announce another 250 million dollars in support of Ukraine’s agricultural sector, which is a key block of the world wheat market.
I asked Alex Marquardt, CNN’s senior national security correspondent in Odesa, about this week’s attacks and whether they may be directly related to the grain issue and Putin’s anger over the key damage. bridge
He sent me this email:
Odesa has been attacked before, as all Ukrainian cities routinely are, with drones and missiles. They are often attacked from the sky, causing damage and harming – if not killing – people, but often miss their target.
What happened the last two nights, and last night in particular, was breathtaking. The attack was, according to the mayor, like nothing Odesa has seen since the beginning of the war. A “fierce battle” from 2 am, relentless for more than an hour.
After the first night, on Monday, the Kremlin said it was a response to the attack on the bridge. But (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelensky said on Wednesday, after the second night, the strikes are about the grain deal and there was a lot of damage at the port last night. That this comes right after Russia pulled out of the grain deal is not lost on anyone.
Marquardt also interviewed Power about the attacks and their effect on Ukraine’s contribution to the world market. Watch his report.
“The idea that Putin would play roulette with the world’s hungriest people at the time of the biggest food crisis of our lifetimes is deeply disturbing,” Power told Marquardt.
He asked if he thought Russia could rejoin the grain deal.
“It will require pressure not only from the United States and the United Nations, but from those countries in sub-Saharan Africa that will suffer the most from rising grain and oil prices,” Power said.
He predicts that Russia will continue to target infrastructure pieces as it faces military setbacks.
“If you’re a bully and an aggressor, it’s always easier to launch missiles and send drones into civilian infrastructure. So I think we should expect the worst from the Russian Federation as it continues to fight on the battlefield.”
Wheat and corn prices on global commodity markets rose on Monday after Russia pulled out of the deal, and rallied again on Wednesday after attacks on Odesa ports and as the fading hope that Russia would rejoin the grain agreement.
From a report by Anna Cooban on CNN Business:
Last year, economic shocks that included the impacts of the Ukraine war and the pandemic were the main reasons for “acute food insecurity” in 27 countries, affecting nearly 84 million people, according to a report of the Food Safety Information Network, a data-sharing platform funded by the European Union and the United States. The FSIN defines acute food insecurity as the lack of sufficient food to the extent that it puts a person’s life or livelihood at risk.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) said in November that the collapse of the agreement would “hit those on the brink of starvation the most”. The warning came after Moscow suspended its participation in the pact for several days following drone attacks on Sevastopol, a port city in Russian-controlled Crimea.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also said at the time that a breakdown of the agreement would turn into a “crisis of [food] affordability in an availability crisis” if farmers around the world could not get the fertilizers they needed before the planting season.
Turkey negotiated earlier versions of the grain deal and plans to host Putin for talks in August.
Without a new grain deal, the options are to use the railways to ship grain from Ukraine to ports in Romania or south-east Europe. The problems in both scenarios are time and money, according to Simon Evenett, a professor of international trade and economic development at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. He told CNN’s Romanian Church that Romania’s ports are currently expanding.
Church noted that China has come to depend on Ukrainian grain and wondered whether Beijing could lean on Russia to re-enter the deal.
Evenett said it is true that China has also experienced droughts that have affected its domestic production.
“If these droughts turn out to be as significant as people are making them out to be, perhaps Beijing will move to force Russia into giving in,” Evenett said. “But I think there are a number of ifs. It’s not yet clear whether Beijing is particularly concerned about its own food security needs.”
