Putin threatens grain shipments after blast
Vladimir Putin has threatened to halt grain shipments after suggesting Ukraine used them to prepare the Crimea bridge bombing.
The Russian president
warned the agreement – which allows Ukraine to send humanitarian shipments of grain to
Africa and Asia and has offered an economic lifeline to Kyiv – could now be stopped.
His claims came after Russian officials previously blamed the attack on the Crimea bridge on a truck bomb.
The explosion destroyed one road section and severely damaged the railway track on the Kerch bridge, damaging a key supply route to the Russian army and a symbol of Putin’s regime linking Russia and Crimea.
Putin said: “If it turns out that humanitarian corridors are being used to commit terrorist acts, then, of course, this will call into question the functioning of
this corridor but first this needs to be established.”
Putin was in Astana, the Kazakh capital, where he was attending a summit with Central Asian leaders.
He also revealed that 222,000 reservists had been called up after the Russian defence ministry originally aimed to
draft 300,000. Of these, 33,000 are already in military units and 16,000 are engaged in combat, he said.
Putin said he did not regret starting the conflict and “did not set out to destroy Ukraine” when he ordered Russian troops to invade.
He said: “What is happening today is unpleasant, to put it mildly. But we would have had all this a little later, only under worse conditions for us, that’s all. So my actions are correct and timely.”
The call-up, announced last month, has proved hugely unpopular in Russia, where almost all men under the age of 65 are registered as reservists.
In the wake of the president’s mobilisation order, tens of thousands of men left Russia.
British military intelligence revealed that supplies and logistics were so bad in the Russian army that troops were forced to pay approximately £570 for their own body armour.
The Ministry of
Defence said that prices for equipment were soaring on Russian resale sites with the price for a vest tripling since April.
It said: “Endemic corruption and poor logistics remain one of the underlying causes of Russia’s poor performance in Ukraine.”
Russia has pledged to give free accommodation to residents of Ukraine’s occupied Kherson region who want to evacuate – a sign that Ukrainian military gains on the war’s southern front have troubled the Kremlin.
Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Moscowappointed regional administration, said a decision was made to evacuate Kherson residents to the Russian regions of Rostov, Krasnodar and Stavropol as well as the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
He said: “We, residents of the Kherson region, know that Russia doesn’t abandon their own.”