It is now becoming clear who will be blamed for the hunger that millions of Africans will suffer in the coming months, perhaps years. Not Vladimir Putin. The Russian dictator and the leader of the African Union, Macky Sall, just tightened ties this week in the Russian resort of Sochi. They were extremely nice to each other. Russia has “always been on the side of Africa,” Putin said, saying “at this new stage of development it attaches great importance to relations with African countries.” After the interview, Sall said he was “very reassured” by “his friend” Putin. “I find Vladimir Putin very committed and aware of the serious problems that the crisis is causing us.”
No, then Europe, with its sanctions. “Our countries are very concerned about the disruptions caused by the blockade of the Swift payment system, by the sanctions,” Sall, also president of Senegal, said at a European Union summit last week. “That matter needs to be resolved as soon as possible.”
Europe has done it again.
Sall meant this: African countries can no longer buy grain from Russia because their European-affiliated banks need the Swift payment system, which no longer works for Russian banks. Although the European Union continues to emphasize that grain and fertilizer deliveries are exempt from the sanctions, those payments do pose a problem, a European official admitted this week against the sanctions. Financial Times† He was talking about a ‘malfunction’.
Cruise missiles on grain silos
It fits right in with the story Putin has been telling for months about his war in Ukraine: the West has done it, expanding NATO eastward. The reversal of causes and effects now also extends to the impending food crisis; with the fraternizing words between Putin and Sall, Africa is also drawn into the Russian sphere of influence of victimization.
That Putin’s words are independent of his actions was again shown this week. While he said that starving Africa is close to his heart, he continued to destroy Ukraine’s grain infrastructure. On Sunday, Russian ships in the Black Sea fired cruise missiles at silos in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mikolayiv, where part of the 20 million tons of Ukrainian grain that is waiting for export to (including) Africa is stored. That same day, four rockets also landed at a grain car repair shop in Kyiv. Railway lines to Romania were also hit.
The attacks also rendered implausible the words of Russian Minister Sergei Lavrov, who promised during talks in Turkey this week that Russia’s Black Sea fleet will not hinder grain exports from Ukrainian ports if Ukraine clears the mines it has foreseen. the coast of Mikolayiv and Odesa. Ukraine, however, believes little in this and wants guarantees from the United Nations.
Threatening putrefaction
In the meantime, Ukraine is desperately trying to get grain to the Baltic States and Romania by trucks, trains and small barges, but it is not making much progress: so far, of the 20 million tons that have to leave the country for the next harvest coming up, just over a million tons left out of the country.
And so most grain is stuck. It is in danger of rotting, and because it cannot go away, there is no place to store next summer’s harvest. Russia and Ukraine normally supply a significant proportion of the grain needed to some African countries, such as as much as 90 percent to Somalia. Due to the impending scarcity, prices have already risen by almost 60 percent since the beginning of this year. Sunflower oil is also scarce and fertilizers, mainly from Russia, are now three times more expensive than before the war. UN Secretary-General Antonin Guterres said this week that the war could “cause a rarely seen wave of hunger and poverty, with social and economic chaos in its wake.”
Stolen grain fills too
Cynically, the only grain that does move is Ukrainian grain that the Russians transport from their occupied territories to their occupied ports of Berdyansk and Mariupol, and to Crimea. There goes the stolen goods in ships — leaked US diplomatic reports named three this week — sailing to the Middle East. One of the ships recently visited Beirut, another sailed to a Turkish port. In total, the Russians have so far stolen 500 thousand tons of grain, with a value of 100 million euros. “I am proud and happy to announce that the first train of grain from a silo in Melitopol is on its way to Crimea,” the head of the occupiers in Zaporizhzhya province boasted to Russia’s Interfax news agency this week. He added that “these transports will increase a hundredfold in the near future.”
Then the question is: will the starving countries accept or refuse those shipments? “That’s not a dilemma at all,” Hassan Khannenje, director of the Horn International Institute for Strategic Studies in Kenya, said on Wednesday. The New York Times† ‘Africans don’t care where they get their food from. If someone raises a moral finger about that, they are mistaken.’
Europe the ogre, and Russia the savior. Whose bread one eats, his word one speaks – even if that bread is spoils of war.