Russia attacking Ukraine food targets to scare world: governor
- Russian attack destroyed warehouses of major Ukrainian commodity terminal, governor says
- A Russian naval blockade is preventing Ukraine from using the Black Sea for food exports
Russia is attacking food and agriculture targets in Ukraine in order to scare the world into agreeing to a deal to reopen the Black Sea on Moscow’s terms, the head of the region where a major agricultural storage facility was struck on Sunday said.
Vitaliy Kim, governor of the Mykolayiv region, where Russian shelling destroyed the warehouses of one of Ukraine’s largest agricultural commodities terminals over the weekend, said Moscow wanted to make global food shortages “look like a catastrophe”.
“They want to do this because they are trying to trade about opening the Black Sea” in the hope of a deal that might allow Ukrainian and Russian grain to use the waterway, possibly in exchange for an easing of sanctions, Kim said in an interview on Wednesday.
“That is why they shoot more. Why they shoot the agricultural enterprises and even fields – just for their own movie that fields are on fire,” said Kim, who was speaking outside his former office, which was destroyed by a Russian missile in March, killing at least 35 people.
Since Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv has repeatedly accused Russia of targeted attacks on infrastructure and agriculture in an effort to provoke a global food crisis and pressure the West.
Moscow, which calls the war a special military operation and denies hitting civilian targets, blames Western sanctions on Russia and sea mines set by Ukraine for the drop in food exports and rising global prices.
Ukraine’s southern military command, in a statement on Wednesday, accused Russia of “attacking farmland and infrastructure sites where fires of considerable scale have broken out”.
A large producer of tomato pulp was also destroyed in Mykolayiv earlier in the conflict, Kim’s spokesman said.
Ukraine said Russia was imposing unreasonable conditions and the Kremlin said free shipment depended on an end to sanctions.
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Türkiye’s* plan, Kim said, was a good idea, “but it all depends on the cost … what Ukraine should pay for opening the Black Sea”, he said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday the onus was on Ukraine to solve the issues with grain shipments by demining the approaches to its ports. He accused the West of exaggerating the global importance of Ukrainian exports.
Ukraine, the world’s fourth largest grains exporter, operates dozens of export terminals along the Black Sea, where cities are regularly shelled by Russia. A Russian blockade is preventing Ukraine from using the sea for exports.
Ukrainian conglomerate Group DF identified the target of Sunday’s Mykolayiv attack as its Nika-Tera port facility in Mykolayiv, saying the attack rendered the port facilities entirely unusable.
Kim’s spokesman said the shelling hit a warehouse where sunflower meal was stored.
The United Nation’s secretary general Antonio Guterres said Wednesday that 1.6 billion people were likely to be affected as the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine worsened.
“The war’s impact on food security, energy and finance is systemic, severe, and speeding up,” Guterres said.
He added that “for people around the world, the war is threatening to unleash an unprecedented wave of hunger and destitution, leaving social and economic chaos in its wake”.
* Turkey has officially changed the spelling of its name
