The international community should help secure safe passage for food export vessels in a corridor out of the port city of Odesa to help Ukraine and avoid world hunger, the BBC quoted Ukrainian First Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko as saying on Monday.
"It would take us 5, 6, 7 years to export all these agricultural yields by [rail/road]. So right now it’s extremely important for us to unblock the seaports," the BBC quoted her as saying in an interview at the World Economic Forum.
"We need a guarantee from partners, of course it’s a defence guarantee, a security guarantee."
(Reporting by Kylie MacLellan, editing by Elizabeth Piper)