Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, called on the international community on Tuesday not to buy “stolen cereals” from Russia from his country and warned that this implies “complicity” with Russian crimes.
“Russia steals grain from Ukraine, loads it onto ships, crosses the [estreito do] Bosphorus and tries to sell them abroad”, denounced Kuleba, in a message posted on the social network. twitter.
Russian thieves steal grain, load it onto ships, sail across the Bosphorus, and try to sell it abroad. I call on all states to remain vigilant and reject such proposals. Don’t buy stolen. Do not become accomplices of Russian crimes. Theft has never brought luck to anyone.
— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) May 24, 2022
the ukrainian minister urged the international community to “remain alert” and reject “this type of offer”since not doing so implies becoming an “accomplice in Russian crimes”.
“Stealing has never brought luck to anyone,” concluded the head of Ukrainian diplomacy in the same message, published after the dissemination of satellite images showing an alleged robberyby Russia, of cereals from Ukraine, one of the world’s largest exporters of this food.
New satellite images from “Maxar Technologies” show stolen Ukrainian grain loaded onto Russian ships in Crimea.
There are two ships under the Russian flag, docked and loaded with stolen grain in the port of provisionally occupied Sevastopol. pic.twitter.com/DtQRyCeQnM— UA Stratcom Center (@StratcomCentre) May 24, 2022
The images were shown on Monday by US television CNN and were collected in the port of Sevastopol, on the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014.
In the images transmitted by the North American channel you can see two Russian-flagged ships dock and load what is believed to be stolen Ukrainian grain.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky had previously accused Russia of taking advantage of the conflict to “slowly steal” Ukrainian food products and sell them.
kyiv accuses Russia of stealing hundreds of thousands of tons of grain
CNN acknowledged that it is difficult to be sure whether the ship is loaded with stolen Ukrainian grain. But Crimea produces little grain, unlike other Ukrainian regions such as Kherson and Zaporizhia, close to the peninsula and now also controlled by Russian forces.
On Twitter, however, the Center for Strategic Communications (Stratcom) of the Ukrainian Ministry of Information and Culture claimed that the images “show stolen Ukrainian cereal grains being loaded onto Russian ships in Crimea“.
According to Sky News, the images were captured on May 19 and 21, and in them you can see the Russian freighters “Matros Pozynich” and “Matros Koshka”.
Before the start of the war, Russian and Ukrainian wheat accounted for almost 30% of world trade, and Ukraine was the world’s fourth-largest exporter of corn and fifth-largest of wheat, according to US State Department data.
The United Nations World Food Program, which helps fight global food insecurity, buys about half of Ukraine’s wheat each year and warns of dire consequences if Ukrainian ports are not reopened.
UN warns of world food and energy crisis due to war in Ukraine
Russia launched a military offensive in Ukraine on February 24 that has killed more than 3,000 civilians, according to the UN, which warns the true toll is likely to be much higher.
The war in Ukraine has already caused more than 14 million people to flee their homes -some eight million internally displaced persons and more than 6.3 million to neighboring countries-, according to the latest UN data, which places this crisis of refugees as the worst in Europe since the Second World War (1939-1945).
The United Nations also said that around 15 million people need humanitarian assistance in Ukraine.
The Russian invasion was condemned by the international community at large, which responded by sending weapons to Ukraine and tightening economic and political sanctions on Moscow.
(News updated at 22:00 with images of alleged freighters stealing Ukrainian grain).
Source: Observadora
