(CNN) — Russian forces are stealing farm equipment and thousands of tons of grain from Ukrainian farmers in the busy areasas well as targeting food storage locations with artillery, multiple sources have told CNN.
The phenomenon has accelerated in recent weeks as Russian units have tightened their control over parts of the rich agricultural regions of Kherson and Zaporizhia in southern Ukraine, the sources said. Since then, planting operations in many areas have been interrupted or abandoned.
The actions of the Russian forces may threaten this year’s harvest in one of the world’s leading grain-producing countries. The volumes involved are said to be enormous.
Oleg Nivievskyi, an agronomist at the Kyiv School of Economics, told CNN that on the eve of the invasion there were 6 million tons of wheat and 15 million tons of corn ready to be exported from Ukraine, much of it withheld. in the south of the country.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said Thursday that some 400,000 tons of grain had been stolen to date.
Farmers and others from Kherson and Zaporizhia have provided CNN with details of multiple thefts.
In late April, Russian soldiers removed 1,500 tons of grain from storage units known as grain elevators in the Kherson village of Mala Lepetykha, using trucks with Crimean license plates. The next day, those same trucks, 35 in all, returned and emptied large storage units known as grain silos in nearby Novorajsk, across the Dnieper River.
In Melitopol, an occupied city in the Zaporizhia region, Mayor Ivan Fedorov shared a video with CNN showing trucks, several of them bearing the “Z” sign for the Russian military, transporting grain to Crimea.
The main grain elevator in the city had been emptied.
Russian bombing of Azovstal plant ‘doesn’t stop’, says Zelensky
(Volodymyr Zelensky/Facebook)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that the shelling of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol “does not stop”, even when “civilians still have to be removed”.
“Women, there are a lot of children left there,” she said during her late-night speech on Thursday. “Imagine hell: more than two months of constant bombing, bombing, constant death nearby.”
The Ukrainian authorities are “doing everything possible to find a solution to save our military heroes” by defending Mariupol, Zelensky added. “There are different units. They have a lot of wounded, but they are not giving up. They are holding the position. And we are also trying to find solutions to find safety for these people.”
On Sunday, more than 100 civilians were evacuated from the Azovstal steel plant, where they spent two months sheltering underground from Russian attacks.
It is unclear how many civilians are trapped at the plant, according to a spokesman for United Nations Secretary-General Stephane Dujarric.
A valuable product, looted on an “overwhelming scale”
Fedorov told CNN that the Russians “went through all the villages, all the yards and searched for agricultural machinery, grain, which they subsequently looted.”
“Chechen soldiers, fighting for Russia, act like criminals from the 90s. First they offer to buy the grain at a ridiculous price. But if you don’t accept, they take everything from you for nothing.”
“The magnitude of the looting is simply overwhelming,” he said.
Agriculture Minister Mykola Solsky said there had been an increase in thefts from farms in the past two weeks. Ukrainian officials say the occupation forces have warned farmers and businesses that if they report the thefts to the police, they and their families will be in danger.
For the squatters, grain is an attractive commodity. The price of wheat is around US$400 a ton in world markets and has increased a lot this year. It is difficult to trace its origin and can be shipped easily.
Nivievskyi says that Middle Eastern countries are happy to buy Russian wheat, which they get at a 20% discount, and they don’t care that it is actually from Ukraine.
Echoes of another dark period in Ukraine’s history
For Ukrainians, the grain seizure recalls a dark period in their history, when Stalin forcibly removed food stocks from Ukrainian peasants in the 1930s, leading to the deaths of millions. Known as Holodomor (to kill by starvation) it is considered an act of genocide by many Ukrainians.
The head of the Luhansk Regional Administration, Serhiy Hayday, claims that the Russians’ target is another Holodomor.
The Russians now occupy regarding 90% of Luhansk’s farmland and have taken some 100,000 tons of grain from the region, according to his calculations.
Much of what they have not stolen has been destroyed. CNN spoke with Anatoliy Detochka, owner of Golden Agro, whose grain storage complex near Rubizhne was destroyed on April 14. The fire was active for two weeks.
An aerial image shows the grain facilities before and following their destruction.
The silo was built just two years ago, at a cost of US$5 million. Detochka told CNN that when it was attacked it contained regarding 17,000 tons of wheat and regarding 8,500 tons of sunflower seeds, worth a total of $13 million.
He’s sure it was a deliberate target because there are no other buildings in the area.
Detochka said at least two other grain elevators in the area were attacked. CNN obtained video of another bombed grain silo in Sylnelkove, Dnipro.
Hayday says that this spring has not been planted in Luhansk “because the Russians are not interested. What for, if they can steal and insure themselves for several years”.
“If they know their grain is going to be confiscated, farmers can say, ‘Here are the keys to the tractor, go and harvest yourselves if you want,'” says Agrarian Policy Minister Solsky.
And official he said that the Russians had only allowed farmers to plant in Kherson if they agreed to give up 70% of the harvest for nothing. Most of the farmers had refused.
The threat of famine and bankruptcy
Trofimtseva said that she had similar stories from Zaporizhia and Kherson. He said that he had heard that the Russians “proposed to buy for 10% of the real value. And if you don’t agree, they expropriate it for nothing. These are not isolated cases. It is a system.”
Grain theft on such a scale, combined with disruption from war, might affect world markets. Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol, said: “If we don’t harvest (the) next harvest, the effect of famine can be significant. And the main route of export is the ports, which are currently blocked.”
Oleg Nivievskyi of the Kyiv School of Economics told CNN that the real risk may stretch out over years, not months. Farmers are losing money and may go bankrupt, he says.
“Even if these regions are released tomorrow, it will take time to restart the production cycle,” perhaps two to three years. Buying fertilizer and equipment and hiring workers would be difficult for the farmers the Russians have zeroed out, because their grain is their working capital for the coming season.”
Detochka, the owner of the Rubizhne silo, agrees. “We work mainly for export. Producers were expecting good prices, waiting for spring, because an important part of grain production is normally sold in spring.”
“Today almost all elevators in Ukraine are full because they cannot sell these products anywhere.”
The stolen harvesters
CNN previously reported on the theft of farm equipment, including seeders and harvesters, from a John Deere dealership in the city of Melitopol.
Video and images obtained by CNN have since shown the equipment being loaded onto flatbed trucks for a 700-mile trip to Chechnya.
Olga Trofimtseva, a former Ukrainian agriculture minister, said she had been told of similar thefts in Donetsk and Kharkiv. “They just stole their equipment and took it across the border: new tractors, combines. Unfortunately, this is their system.”
Further south, Vasiliy Tsvigun saw decades of construction work wiped out from his farm in Myrne, Zaporizhia. Tsvigun endured threats and robberies in early March, but decided to stay on his farm even as Russian forces closed in.
When they arrived, “they fired a machine gun burst over my head,” he said. “They threw me to the ground and took our generator.”
Tsvigun said Russian forces soon returned and held him at gunpoint while they ransacked the house. After escaping into Ukrainian-controlled territory, locals told him they had stolen all the fertilizer, as well as British-made farm chargers. Tsvigun tracked one of them’s long journey to Kursk, Russia, using GPS, he told CNN.
Tsvigun says he used GPS to track the location of the looted goods.
“They took a new combine, which had been recently delivered to us. They took a planting machine, a big expensive machine. And they overturned one of the tractors, driving drunk. Now it’s lying in a ditch.” Tsvigun said.
As for his grain, 2,000 tons, Tsvigun said that “it is most likely that they have also taken it away. But the combine harvester thing is already a fact.”
“The Russians live there now,” Vasiliy said with a tone of resignation. “Nobody can go there anymore.”
“What they have already stolen costs around US$2 million. Not counting the grain, not counting the buildings.”
Tsvigun shared photos with CNN showing some of the equipment he says was stolen by Russian forces.
Now that Ukrainian ports, such as Odessa, are practically closed to commercial traffic, farmers in the areas still controlled by Ukraine are facing difficulties in exporting their grain.
But a ray of hope remains. A part of the grain now goes by rail to Romania. At the end of April, a cargo ship, the Unity N, left the Romanian port of Constanta, according to maritime sources, loaded with 71,000 tons of Ukrainian grain.
CNN is aware that Romania is willing to invest in rail improvements along the route and has launched a tender for the works. But exporting grain to the rest of Europe by rail is not easy because rail networks have different gauges, which means that not all trains can run on all rail lines.
Meanwhile, many Ukrainian farmers face a bleak future, as do their consumers.
In Luhansk, “there is no bread now nor is there expected to be in the future,” says Hayday, recalling the Holodomor. “The Russians will leave the Ukrainians in the occupied territories on the verge of starvation.”
But Vasiliy Tsvigun, whose years of work have been ruined, does not think regarding his farm. “The main thing now is Ukraine’s victory.”
“There will be a victory: we will rebuild everything.”
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Bush called Zelensky the “Winston Churchill of our time” in his post and “thanked the president for his leadership, his example, and his commitment to freedom.”
