Huge Russian grain ‘robbery’ could see food crisis worsen
Ukrainian officials say Russian forces have taken vast stores of grain from Ukraine and exported it to Russia, exacerbating the risk of shortages and hunger in areas under Russian control.
Farmers in Ukrainian territory occupied by Russian forces have reported that the Russians are ‘‘stealing their grain en masse’’, according to a statement from Ukraine’s Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food.
Agriculture Minister Mykola Solskyi said on Ukrainian TV last week that he had heard a surge of accounts from elevator operators of Russians seizing grain in recent weeks in occupied areas.
‘‘This is outright robbery,’’ he said, warning that the behaviour could cause a food crisis.
One of the world’s largest grain exporters, Ukraine has seen its industry hobbled by Russian attacks and blockades of sea ports that Ukraine relied on to transport food products to countries around the world. Countries in the Middle East and South Asia rely heavily on
Ukrainian grain, and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that the war could exacerbate global hunger.
Ukrainian officials say hunger is a growing threat at home, too – and accuse Russia of deliberately seeking to prevent Ukrainians from consuming or selling their agricultural products.
Ukraine had 30 million tonnes of wheat in storage as of last month. Deputy Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskiy said it had enough food stocks in the parts of the country it still controlled to feed the population there, Reuters reported. But in Russianoccupied territory, it could be a different story, officials warned.
Two months into its invasion, Russia controls swaths of southern Ukraine – a region that helped the country earn its reputation as the breadbasket of Europe. Vysotskiy said the Russians had exported about 441,000 tonnes of grain from four occupied regions: Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk.
Vysotskiy said 1.4 million tonnes of grain were stored in occupied territory and were needed for the daily food needs of
Ukrainians who live there.
More than 90% of the farmland in Luhansk is in the northern part of the region, which Russian forces have taken over since February. Serhiy Haidai, the regional governor of Luhansk, said the Russians had removed or destroyed a quantity of grain that would have met residents’ needs for three years.
Reports of Russian attacks on Ukrainian grain facilities have also mounted. Haidai accused Russia of attacking a grain elevator in Rubizhne, a city in Luhansk, in April, destroying nearly 19,000 tonnes of wheat and about 9400 tonnes of sunflower product.
Earlier this week, the regional governor of Dnipropetrovsk shared a video of a rocket attack which he said destroyed a grain warehouse in the Synelnykove district.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week accused countries of making backroom deals with Moscow to buy grain ‘‘stolen fromUkraine’’. He did not name the countries.
If confirmed, the alleged grain seizures and attacks targeting grain facilities could fuel allegations of war crimes. International law prohibits pillaging places taken in war and intentionally starving civilians by depriving them of food and basic necessities.
Ukrainian officials allege that Russia is trying to cause a famine in Ukraine. Some have drawn parallels to the Holodomor, the famine engineered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that killed about 4 million people in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.
Solskyi described alleged Russian pillaging of grain in recent weeks as reminiscent of the 1930s. ‘‘The goal is the Holodomor,’’ Haidai said after the grain elevator bombing in Rubizhne.
Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova, in a Facebook post, repeated the comparison, and called the exportation of grain from occupied areas a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Russia has been blockading Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, preventing Ukraine from exporting grain and other agricultural products. Zelenskyy said Ukraine could lose tens of millions of tonnes of grain as a result of the blockade, telling Australia’s 60 Minutes that ‘‘Russia wants to completely block our country’s economy’’.
Global food prices are already skyrocketing. Countries such as Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan, which rely heavily on Ukrainian wheat, are likely to be hardest hit by export blockages.
Since the war began, Ukraine has sought other ways to transport wheat out of the country. Vysotskiy said it had increased grain exports in April through these alternative routes, and that he expected another rise in May.
But Ukraine can’t export nearly as much wheat by train as by sea, and the WFP has warned that without functioning ports, the risk of famine around the world is growing.