Russian troops in Ukraine are shipping grain and production vital to the Ukrainian economy to Crimea, the country’s officials alleged, adding to their list of grievances against the Russian occupying forces as local allies in Russia. was invited to attend.
The military administration of the Zaporizhzhya region said a column of Russian trucks loaded with Ukrainian grain left the occupied town of Enerhodar on Tuesday accompanied by a Russian military escort. He said it bound for the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The administration also said that vegetables and sunflower seeds are being taken.
The Kremlin and the Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, in the Russian-occupied southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, officials of strategic importance for access to the Black Sea plan to submit requests to formally accept Moscow as part of a Russia-Kremlin-aligned an official said on Wednesday.
“There will be a request to treat the Kherson region as a full-fledged unit of the Russian Federation,” said Kirill Stremosov, deputy head of the military-civilian administration of the region, during a press conference, in comments made by the Russian State News Service. TASS. TASS quoted officials as saying that the region would prepare a legal framework for joining Russia by the end of the year.
The development comes months after Moscow recognized the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk republics within their constitutional boundaries. Mr Putin ordered Russian troops to enter two separate regions of Ukraine after he recognized its independence in February.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that residents of the Kherson region will have to decide their own fate.
“Such important decisions must have a clear legal basis, legal justification and be absolutely valid, as was the case with Crimea,” Mr Peskov said.
Ukraine and most of the international community regard Crimea as occupied Ukrainian territory.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, Ukraine provides about 10% of global wheat exports, 14% of corn exports, and nearly half of the world’s sunflower oil.
Since Russia’s invasion on February 24, the department has cut its outlook for world wheat trade in the current season by more than 6 million tonnes, or 3%, due to lower Russian and Ukrainian exports expected to grow elsewhere. are supposed to.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday, “Without our agricultural exports, dozens of countries in different parts of the world are already on the verge of deficit. And over time the situation could become really dire.”
Ukraine has accused other Russians of theft in the food sector.
In late April, authorities in the Zaporizhzhya region said that Russian forces had captured an agricultural business in the town of Kamianka-Dniprovska and confiscated 61 tons of wheat.
Ukrainian farmers have accused the Russian military of stealing their equipment, including tractors and trucks. They also say that Russia has destroyed equipment and mined their land, which they believe is a deliberate attempt to influence Ukraine’s lucrative agricultural sector.
“The plundering of grain from the Kherson region, as well as the blockade of shipments from Ukrainian ports and mining of shipping routes threaten global food security,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said, referring to another part of the country’s south.
On Tuesday, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said shipments of stolen grain from Ukraine had reached the Mediterranean Sea on Russian-flagged ships bound for the Middle East. In the past week, Egypt has returned two Russian ships that stole Ukraine’s wheat, Ruslan Nechai, Ukraine’s in charge of Egypt, told the Wall Street Journal on Monday.
Since the beginning of the war a large part of Kherson is occupied by the Russian army. The agriculturally rich regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhya are among the most productive for Ukraine’s agricultural sector, often referred to as the breadbasket of Europe for the region’s vast wheat and grain production.
Wheat stocks were already running low and prices were at their highest due to two years of inclement weather, when the Russian invasion jammed Black Sea trade. The war has driven up prices and prompted fears of food shortages in countries fed with imported grain.
The World Bank recently warned of a global food catastrophe resulting from Russia’s invasion.
Poland and Lithuania are in talks with Ukraine to allow the country to export its summer grain crop through its ports, bypassing Russia’s naval blockade in the Black Sea. Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said in an interview that in order to move Ukraine’s wheat to global markets, Poland would provide space at its ports in Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin, and would place those ports at the disposal of Ukraine.
Ukraine says it is not only significant produce being forcibly transferred to Russia, but also thousands of people living in Russian-controlled states of eastern Ukraine and other towns and cities occupied by Russian forces. The head of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, over which Russia wants full control, has said 30,000 people have been deported to Russia from the city of Mariupol alone.
Russia denied forcing Ukrainians to leave their homes, and said late Tuesday that 8,800 people were evacuated from Ukraine into its territory in the past 24 hours, including more than 1,000 children. It said more than 1.2 million people have been evacuated to Russia since the start of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
In other developments, the UK’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research said global economic output would be about $1.5 trillion less at the end of 2022 had Russia not invaded Ukraine, a loss of about 1% of world GDP. .
In its first report on the global economic outlook since the start of the war, the institute said the conflict would result in higher energy and food prices, as well as reduced global activity due to domestic and business confidence.
Britain’s leading independent economic research body said it now expects the global economy to grow by 3.3% this year, from a 4.2% expansion forecast in January. For the next year it sees growth of 3.2%, down from 3.5% in January.
Ukraine on Wednesday began reducing the flow of Russian natural gas from its territory to Europe, posing a new threat to the energy security of a continent already set to end its reliance on Russian fossil fuels. was running.
The company that runs Ukraine’s pipeline network blocked gas flow through a major entry point in the country’s east, blaming interference by Russian troops with critical gas infrastructure.
Ukraine’s gas TSO stopped Russian exports through the Sokhranivka entry point on the border between the Donbass and Russia’s Luhansk region. Ukraine accounts for a third of Russian gas exports to Europe via cross-border and feeds 3% of the EU’s total gas consumption.
—Alastair Macdonald and Mauro Orru contributed to this article.