Echoes of Stalin as Putin seizes grain

RUSSIA has stolen 400,000 tonnes of grain from its occupied territories in Ukraine, taking desperately needed food from starving locals.

In what Kyiv called a deliberate bid to weaponise hunger echoing Stalin, Farming Minister Taras Vysotsky said Vladimir Putin’s forces had looted and exported a third of stocks from Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia in the south and east.

Mr Vysotsky said that Russia now controls 1.3million tonnes of the staple crop across the four areas, which will make further harvests there impossible.

‘These are not some strategic reserves, but what is needed to ensure daily food security for Ukrainians living there,’ Mr Vysotsky said. ‘Such behaviour is alarming. There may be Ukrainians in these territories who are physically unable to access food, and there is a threat of hunger,’ he added. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told the Daily Mail that Mr Putin’s theft of crops echoed the horrors of a 20th century famine imposed by dictator Joseph Stalin.

‘From 1932 to 1933, the Soviet regime deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians to death by taking away our food and creating an artificial hunger,’ Mr Kuleba said.

‘We see what the Russians are doing now as a continuation of this genocidal policy.’

The country refers to Stalin’s brutal enforcement of collective farming as the Holodomor, or hunger extermination, in which at least 4million Ukrainians died.

The Mail revealed last week how one of the Kremlin’s puppet regional parliaments accidentally unveiled Moscow’s plan to grab Ukrainian agricultural products. Putin loyalist Vladislav Zyryanov called on Russia ‘to increase the volume of supplies for domestic Russian consumers by moving food from other southern (Ukrainian) regions taken under its control.’ The statement by the Siberian MP, the first time any Russian official had admitted that Moscow planned to seize Ukrainian crops, was quickly taken down after being posted online.

Ukraine is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of food, but the fighting, along with Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, has already hit crop production and exports. Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Haidai last night said two eastern cities, Popasna and Rubizhne, only have enough food and water to last another week.

The situation led the Mail Force Ukraine Appeal and the Ukrainian embassy in London to team up and send £8million worth of food aid to affected regions.

A staggering 500,000 food parcels have been bought, partly financed by kind Mail readers’ donations.