Russian blockade of Black Sea ports hits Ukraine grain exports
HAMBURG (Reuters) – Russian attacks on Ukraine’s grain infrastructure look like attempts to reduce the competition in Russia’s export markets, German Agriculture Minister Cem Oezdemir was reported as saying on Monday.
Ukraine could lose tens of millions of tons of grain due to Russia’s blockade of its Black Sea ports, triggering a food crisis that will hit Europe, Asia and Africa, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday.
“We are repeatedly receiving reports about targeted Russian attacks on grain silos, fertilizer stores, farming areas and infrastructure,” Oezdemir was quoted as telling the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland, a cooperation network of German regional newspapers.
Russia denies targeting civilian areas.
The suspicion is growing that Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking “in the long term to remove Ukraine as a competitor,” Oezdemir was quoted as saying.
Russia and Ukraine are traditionally major competitors in global grains markets. Global wheat prices have risen about 40% since Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine cut supplies available on world markets from the Black Sea.
According to International Grains Council data, Ukraine was the world’s fourth-largest grain exporter in the 2020/21 season, selling 44.7 million tons abroad. The volume of exports has fallen
sharply since the Russian invasion.
“With the increasing hunger in the world, Russia is seeking to build up pressure,” Oezdemir told the network. “At the same time, the massive increase in market prices is coming in handy for Russia because this brings new money into the country.”
Oezdemir said he would raise the question of how Ukraine could be helped to boost its grain exports at a meeting of G7 agriculture ministers in mid-May.
“We must seek alternative transport methods,” he said. “Railway transport could be a method of exporting more grain, although with much effort and with limited capacity.”
Germany would seek to give
assistance, he added.
Ukraine has been gradually expanding grain exports using land transport to the European Union. But the different rail track widths in Ukraine and the EU mean Ukrainian trains cannot automatically operate on the European rail network.
Moscow calls its actions a “special military operation” to disarm Ukraine and rid it of anti-Russian nationalism fomented by the West. Ukraine and the West say Russia launched an unprovoked war of aggression that threatens to spiral into a much wider conflict.
Meanwhile, efforts to evacuate more civilians from the devastated Ukrainian port city of Mariupol ran into delays on Monday, and hundreds of people remained trapped in the Azovstal Steel Works, the last stronghold of resistance to the Russian siege.
It was not clear what was causing the hold-up of a convoy made up of civilians from the city itself.
On other fronts, towns in eastern Ukraine were coming under intense Russian bombardment, a regional governor said. A Russian rocket strike hit a main bridge across the Dniester Estuary just west of the port city of Odesa in southwest Ukraine, authorities said.
Putin’s forces are now in control of nearly all the Sea of Azov city, linking up Russian-held territory to the west and east. Moscow said last week it had decided against storming the steel works and would instead blockade it. But bombardments have continued.
The Russian military is now focusing on crushing resistance in Ukraine’s south and east after failing to capture Kyiv in the early weeks of the war.
Its assaults have flattened cities, killed thousands of civilians and forced more than five million to flee the country.
Ukraine’s military said on Monday Russian forces were trying to take over the eastern town of Rubizhne and prepare an assault on Sievierodonetsk.
Moscow is pushing for complete control of the Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists already held parts of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces before the invasion.