In a field near Odesa, Igor Shumeyko pointed to where a Russian rocket landed near his farmhouse. It blew out the glass from his windows. Three more missiles fell on a neighbouring plot but didn’t explode. “I was on my land when the invasion started. The Russians think we are slaves. But our guys are going to kick them out,” Shumeyko predicted.
In the meantime, the 42-year-old farmer acknowledged his industry is facing a heap of war-related problems. The biggest is what to do with this season’s crop, currently growing on his 1,000-hectare estate. The wheat is due to be harvested in late June and July. Next come sunflowers in August and September.
Before Russia’s offensive, Shumeyko would load the grain on to a truck. It would be transported 15 miles from his village of Velykyi Dalnyk to Odesa, Ukraine’s biggest commercial port. From there, food products continued their journey by ship across the Black Sea. Ukraine’s grain helped feed an estimated 400 million people. It went to Egypt, Tunisia and beyond.
Since 24 February, however, this maritime traffic has entirely ceased. Russia has blockaded and occupied all of Ukraine’s seaports. It has seized Mariupol and Berdiansk on the Sea of Azov, which is now a de facto Russian lake, and overrun Snake Island, a strategic base, allowing it to control shipping to and from the Dardanelles strait.
Ukraine can no longer export its agricultural produce. About 22m tonnes of food is stuck. Many farmers say they have no space to store this summer’s harvest. Others are building makeshift shelters. Shumeyko says he is running low on fertiliser, which used to arrive through Odesa. His last sacks of ammonium nitrate are stored next to his red tractor.
The UN World Food Programme has warned that millions of people will die if Ukraine’s ports remain blocked. Vladimir Putin has offered to open up a sea corridor but only if the west lifts what he calls “politically motivated” sanctions. He accuses Ukraine of mining its ports. Kyiv says Moscow is guilty of blackmail, with the foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, calling on the world to act.
Sanctions on Russia have no connection to the unfolding global food crisis. The sole reason for shortages, rising prices, and threat of hunger is the Russian military physically blocking 22 million tons of Ukrainian food exports in our seaports. Demand Moscow to end its blockade.
— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) May 28, 2022
The topic is now at the top of the international agenda. In a phone call on Saturday, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor Olaf Scholz tried to persuade Putin to lift the blockade, without success. In his nightly video address on Saturday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said he discussed the crisis with Boris Johnson, as well as the related issue of military aid.
The Ministry of Defence points out that Ukraine has deployed maritime mines “because of the continued credible threat of amphibious Russian assaults from the Black Sea”. It says Moscow is falsely trying to present itself as a “reasonable actor”. In reality, it is leveraging global food security in order to advance its “political aims” and “to blame the west for any failure”.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 29 May 2022
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) May 29, 2022
Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/uOVOzCZE8O
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/f1hL0W2AGs
Ukraine’s former defence minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk said Russia would break any maritime deal to which it agreed, and “sink one or two Ukrainian ships”. He has suggested Turkey and the UK send vessels to enforce a waterways equivalent of a “no-fly zone” in the north-west Black Sea. “We need to unblock it militarily,” he said.
“Ukraine is an agricultural superpower,” he added. “This is our number one problem. It’s a question of the country’s survival. Without the grain, the economy will stop and die out. This isn’t just about us. It’s about the global situation. We are talking about hunger of huge proportions here.”
On Saturday, the head of Velykyi Dalnyk, Denis Tkachenko, met with other Odesa region mayors to discuss the blockade. There were no simple answers. Belarus, the Kremlin’s ally, is unlikely to facilitate road shipments without the lifting of western sanctions. Poland uses a different track gauge to Ukraine, making railway transport expensive.
The Russians, meanwhile, have twice fired cruise missiles at the bridge over the Dniester estuary in Zatoka, in the Odesa region, closing off a vital land route to the south-west and Romania. One small-scale solution is to take the grain to the Ukrainian port of Izmail on the Danube river. But this is costly for farmers at a time when diesel prices are going up.
“It used to be easy. Odesa had big traffic. It was Ukraine’s main port,” Tkachenko said. He described a tentative UK-Turkish plan to create a humanitarian sea corridor as “realistic”, adding: “Putin won’t attack English ships.” His 100-hectare farm grows wheat, sunflowers and strawberries, he said, irrigated by water taken from the Dniester through a network of Soviet-era canals.
In Odesa, the harbour is eerily quiet. The Ukrainian army has sealed off the port area. There are sandbags and checkpoints in the city’s historic centre, with its statue of Catherine the Great, Odesa’s imperial founder. The Potemkin steps – made famous by the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein in his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin – are no longer accessible to the public.
Russia’s apparent plan to storm Odesa from the sea has not yet happened. In the meantime, life continues. Couples, dog-walkers and kids on scooters go up and down Primorsky Boulevard, which overlooks the port. Swifts screech in the sky; the air is heady with the scent of elderflower blossom; a Pushkin statue has the inscription “Odesa resident”.
Taking in the harbour view, the Odesa city council deputy, Peter Obukhov, pointed to a row of giant steel cylinders. These, he explained, were grain silos, filled to capacity. The cranes next to them were idle. Nearby was a rusting three-masted sailing ship, Druzhba, and an ancient ferry. The Black Sea sparkled in the sunshine. It was tranquil and boatless.
The state-owned port and private tug company are the biggest employer in Odesa, with a workforce of 5,000 people. Their salaries contribute to the city’s budget. “It’s very difficult to transfer last year’s harvest by road. We need to lift the blockade,” Obukhov said. He added: “Even if Putin died and the war stopped, it would take half a year to ship the grain we already have.”
The Russians have fired long range missiles at Odesa on several occasions. But it has been spared the destruction meted out to other Russian-speaking Ukrainian cities including Mariupol and Kharkiv. One explanation is the Kremlin thinks it enjoys some local support – a view not borne out by polling data and by non-scientific conversations conducted by the Guardian.
Odesa’s mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, has dumped his previous Russian-friendly position and is now a Ukrainian patriot. According to Obukhov, who ran against Trukhanov, Moscow still plans to capture Odesa and to create a land corridor stretching to Transnistria, a breakaway pro-Russian republic of Moldova. “Putin wants everything. The whole of Ukraine and Moldova as well,” Obukhov said.
In the first days of the invasion, Russian troops advancing from Crimea captured large chunks of southern Ukraine. They include the agricultural heartlands in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Kyiv says Moscow has stolen grain from local producers as well as farming equipment and agri-drones. Satellite photos suggest thousand of tonnes have been loaded on to ships in Crimea and sold abroad, including to Syria.
Hennadiy Lahuta, the head of Kherson’s Ukrainian military administration, said some farmers were cooperating with Russia. Others are not planting or are unable to plant because of fighting. “What can be said for sure is that the Russians are transporting food and grain from the Kherson region. Traffic jams on the road to Crimea are already several kilometres long,” he said last week.
This theft has painful historical echoes. In 1932-33, about 4 million people died as a result of Stalin’s state-engineered famine in Ukraine. Teams of Communist party enforcers went to villages and individual houses, confiscating grain, seeds, cows and vegetables. Peasants starved to death. The famine – known as the Holodomor – had a political aspect. It was designed to wipe out support for Ukrainian independence.
Back in Velykyi Dalnyk, Shumeyko said he would sell his wheat and vegetables on the domestic market. It was a contribution to the war effort. He said he enjoyed his job, which involved spending time outdoors amid a blooming landscape of fields, swallows and wild roses. “A good harvest requires professionalism and protecting crops. When you bring it in, you get a great feeling in your soul.”
