The recent collapse of the Russia-Ukraine grain deal spells disaster for millions. The year-old deal has allowed 1,000 ships to export food products from Ukraine by sea, including 80% of the grain going to the World Food Programme. The biggest recipients of Ukrainian grain have been China, Spain, Turkey and Italy, but 57% of it went to 14 countries currently defined as most threatened with starvation, including Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen and the war-hit Horn of Africa.
Russia has stopped Ukraine’s food exports through the Black Sea, citing multitudinous western sanctions imposed on its own trade. Although these do not include farm products, Vladimir Putin says that if sanctions imposed since the 2022 deal are rescinded, he will resume the deal. Meanwhile, he is telling African leaders at his summit in St Petersburg this week that he will replace Ukraine’s grain with his own. This is unlikely to happen; nor can the EU realistically replace sea transport with land transport.
Everything Putin says may be lies. The Kremlin is a monument of mendacity and its recent bombing of Odesa’s grain warehouses is an obscenity. Destroying food has nothing to do with the ground war in Ukraine, any more than does sinking grain tankers trying to run the gauntlet to Turkey. But the fact remains that grain is not getting out to those who most need it. These are people who have nothing to do with this war and are distant victims of its escalation by the west through the toughest trade sanctions ever imposed on a big and complex modern economy.
Common philanthropy demands that Putin’s offer be put to the test. Sometimes, deals must be done with the devil. Western sanctions have been wholly ineffective in influencing the course or possible outcome of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is hard to discern how far they have even harmed Russia’s civilian population, while they have imposed a high price on European energy users through Russia’s wholly predictable retaliatory sanctions. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development even reckons the Russian economy will next year return from shrinkage to expansion. It is already calculated, by the IMF, to have a growth rate that exceeds the UK’s. The west is thus trapped into continuing a failed policy for no other reason than that pride forbids it to stop. Meanwhile, those most affected – global consumers of Ukraine’s food exports – must suffer. This cannot be right.
I have asked for, but failed in all attempts to find, evidence that the UK government – or, I assume, any western government – did any forecast of the consequences of sanctions before imposing them. Elementary economics should have predicted that Russia’s huge dollar reserves, reputedly about $650bn, would protect its economy from severe damage. Predictable too was the impact of retaliatory sanctions on European energy and food prices.
Was this never discussed? It would have been far better to concentrate all resources on aiding Ukraine on the battlefield. The modern economic sanction is a weapon not unlike America’s A-bomb in the film Oppenheimer: its rhetoric, its potency and its capacity to cause harm so exhilarates its creators that there is little thought given to its practical consequences or moral implications. It becomes an article of faith as much as a weapon of war – and as such unchallengeable.
Henry Kissinger and many diplomats before him argued that sound foreign policy often involves painful choices between competing evils. This is as true today as it was during the cold war. Backstairs understandings must be reached and channels must be kept open. Just now the world is grappling with climate crisis. But how seriously? It should surely mean persuading China to reduce its voluminous carbon emissions and to continue exporting metals vital to the green economy. What is the point of the west waging a low-intensity trade war against Beijing, with added vilification? Is a marginal risk to British security really more important than global heating? Likewise, abhorrence of Putin in Ukraine should not stall all dealings with Russia whatever the collateral cost.
Philosophers may be able to invent some algorithm that balances good and evil consequences in a country’s relations with the outside world. When Britain joined the Afghan and Iraq wars, such an algorithm might have avoided the mix of self-righteousness, neo-colonialism and military glamour that drove policy at the time. Hundreds of thousands died as a result. The diplomacy of those wars was barely an advance on that preceding the first world war.
The deaths now being suffered in Ukraine are Putin’s direct responsibility. If hundreds of thousands more die elsewhere, he must also share the blame, but the root cause of much misery will be the western sanctions that he regards as justification for so many malign actions. It must be worth pulling every possible lever to get him to relent – even if it bruises the west’s faith in its most beloved weapon of aggression, the economic sanction.
• This article was amended on 28 July 2023 to clarify that Poland hasn’t blocked Ukrainian grain from passing through its territory.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist, author and BBC broadcaster. His recent books include England’s Hundred Best Views, and Mission Accomplished? The Crisis of International Intervention
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
