How Russia is holding Ukraine’s wheat exports to ransom

Starvation is a weapon as old as war itself. But Vladimir Putin has put a perversely postmodern twist on the ancient stratagem. Instead of menacing his Ukrainian enemy with hunger and poverty, he is threatening the whole world. Putin has long used oil and gas as a political instrument, most recently cutting off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria in retaliation for their refusal to pay their bills in roubles. But it is Putin’s blockade of the export of Ukrainian wheat that could prove just as effective in Russia’s war of weaponised commodities.

Together, Russia and Ukraine produce 30 per cent of the global wheat exports. Ukraine is the world’s sixth biggest exporter of grains, almost all of it through seven Black Sea ports from Odessa to Mariupol. Seeing this vulnerability, the Kremlin made a naval blockade of Ukraine a top priority in the build-up to war. In January and February of this year, one of the earliest bellwethers of the coming conflict was the mass recall of Russian warships from stations as far afield as Africa and the Arctic to redeploy in the Black Sea. On the opening day of the Kremlin’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine, Russian aircraft bombed a Turkish-flagged freighter 50 miles outside Odessa. The next day the Panamanian–registered grain ship Namura Queen was targeted by a Russian anti-ship missile on its approach to the port of Pivdenniy, and the Moldovan-flagged Millennial Spirit was also hit and damaged nearby, injuring several crew members.

These early attacks on non-Ukrainian ships well beyond Kyiv’s territorial waters sent a very deliberate message: Ukraine’s ports were strictly off limits to international shipping until the Kremlin said otherwise. To back up the threat, the Russian Black Sea fleet has, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence, deployed around 20 surface vessels and four submarines on constant patrol between Serpent Island and Sevastopol, along with Bal and Bastion coastal missile systems as well as strike aviation based in Crimea.