Attacking ports ‘risks food crisis’
Russia’s ambitions to overtake southern Ukraine appear to have grown, with reports that it has fired hypersonic missiles at the Black Sea city of Odesa, while Ukraine’s leadership is warning of a global food crisis if Moscow does not lift a naval blockade that has decreased grain shipments leaving the nation’s ports.
Ukraine said seven missiles struck targets in Odesa, including a shopping centre and a warehouse. Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesman for the Odesa regional military, said a separate strike by three Kinzhal hypersonic missiles hit ‘‘tourism’’ locations.
Pentagon analysts have noticed an increase in Russian manpower and sorties by fighter jets deployed in Ukraine since Tuesday. Most Russian attacks remain concentrated in the Donbas region and the ports of Mariupol and Odesa.
Citing the key role that Odesa plays in the global agricultural trade, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said shortages of grain exports were bound to get worse if attacks continued and Western powers did not put an end to the Russian blockade of Ukraine’s ports. Nations around the world depend heavily on grain from the fertile Black Sea region, which some call the ‘‘breadbasket of Europe’’.
Ukraine was sitting on €8 billion (NZ$13.3B) worth of wheat that could not be exported amid the war and Russia’s blockade of Black Sea ports, European Investment Bank president Warner Hoyer said.
In the nation’s northeast, around Kharkiv, the Ukrainian military was gradually pushing Russian troops back, Zelenskyy said.
■ Russian President Vladimir Putin has sidelined his spymasters in the war against Ukraine and replaced them with military intelligence chiefs, including a former special forces officer accused of being behind the Salisbury poisonings.
The Federal Security Service (FSB), the country’s main spy agency, has been blamed for intelligence failings that blighted the botched invasion. Responsibility for espionage activity in
Ukraine has been passed to the GRU, the rival military intelligence service, according to a report by Russian security analysts.
The GRU, which is a branch of the army and maintains its own special forces units, has been implicated in operations around the world, including attempted coups, assassinations, and sabotage of critical infrastructure. British authorities named two of its agents as the prime suspects in the attempted poisoning of defector and former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018.
Vladimir Alekseyev, the first deputy head of the GRU, who was named as one of the chief organisers of the Skripal assassination attempt, is now in charge of intelligence operations in Ukraine.
‘‘Fellow officers regard him as brutal and self-confident to the point of recklessness,’’ said Russian security experts Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov in a report for Washington think tank the Centre for European Policy Analysis. He was sanctioned by the EU because of the Salisbury attack, and is also on a US sanctions list because of his suspected involvement in Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Ukrainian intelligence has put Alekseyev – who was born in Soviet Ukraine – on its list of war criminals. Officials said he had been responsible for gathering information used to launch missile strikes on civilian targets in Ukraine, and had overseen sham referendums in occupied territory.
The GRU has been in the ascendant since the appointment of Sergei Shoigu as defence minister a decade ago, coinciding with a humiliating fall from grace for the FSB, which was charged with intelligence-gathering and political agitation in Ukraine in the years leading up to the invasion.
Although the FSB is officially a domestic security service, its Fifth Service division was set up at the end of the 1990s, when Putin was director, with a brief to carry out operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
In March, after a string of blunders in the early days of the invasion, the head of the Fifth Service, Sergei Beseda, was sent to Lefortovo prison. A purge of about 150 FSB officers was conducted last month.