The Russian blockade of the port of Odessa has limited the country’s grain exports and is about to trigger a global food crisis, warn several Western countries. At the same time, Russia has already ensured that the countries of Africa will not run out of supplies. But how?
The answer may lie in the results of an investigation by Lloyd’s List, a shipping industry publication, which concludes that nine Russian and Syrian freighters illegally transport Ukrainian grain to ports in Turkey and Syria.
According to the Daily Telegraph, Lloyd’s List has identified nine freighters involved in “suspicious behaviour” in the last month: the Russian Matros Koshka, Matros Pozynich, Mikhail Nenashev, Vera, Fedor and Sormovsky 48 and the Syrian Finikia and Souria. They have all been traveling between the Crimean peninsula (annexed by Russia in 2014) and ports in Turkey and Syria.
However, the suspicion that they are transporting stolen Ukrainian grain is heightened by the fact that before reaching Crimea, on the Black Sea, they will all be disable automatic identification systems (AIS), something that is illegal under maritime conventions but is rarely sanctioned.
“There is a clause that allows them to be turned off if the safety of the ship is threatened,” Michelle Bockman, an analyst at Lloyd’s List, told the Telegraph. “But it’s very rare for them to go out, unless the ship wants to hide its destination, origin or cargo.”
The maritime intelligence group Windward had already warned that, since the start of the war, the number of Russian tankers using this system had skyrocketed.
In recent months, Ukrainian and Western officials have accused Russia of looting grain from occupied areas of Ukraine. In May, the Center for Strategic Communications (Stratcom) of the Ukrainian Ministry of Information and Culture published images it claims 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”.
kyiv warns that buying ‘stolen grain’ from Russia is complicit in crimes
On Friday, Ukraine called on Turkey to detain and detain the Russian freighter Zhibek Zholy, docked at the port of Karasu, for “illegal export of Ukrainian grain.” Turkey has denied that it is collaborating with such activities and says it is investigating.
Before the start of the war, Russian and Ukrainian wheat accounted for nearly 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.
Source: Observadora
