Putin’s War Becomes Putin’s Food Crisis

“The problem of exporting grain from Ukraine does not exist,” Vladimir Putin said Friday, during remarks carried by Russian state television.

He was lying, as he’s wont to do from time to time. The “problem of exporting grain from Ukraine” absolutely exists. And he should know, because he is that problem.

Specifically, Putin is impeding the export of millions of tons of grain, including wheat and corn, by blockading the country’s ports. In addition, Russia has reportedly seized grain in territories it occupies, and this is a rare case where “seized” is a euphemism. The correct word is “stolen.”

To the extent Russia is in fact removing grain from territories it holds, Moscow would probably say it’s not Ukraine’s grain, but rather Russia’s grain — a reward for “liberating” Ukrainian territory. Not even the Russian army believes Putin’s messianic narrative or if they do, some soldiers aren’t able to articulate a coherent version of it when pressed by locals. The New Yorker‘s Joshua Yaffa described a recent episode when Serhii Pryima, district council head of Melitopol, a city in southern Ukraine, asked a young Russian soldier manning a checkpoint what the Russians were doing in the city. “We’ve come to liberate you,” the soldier explained. When Pryima asked, “From whom?”, the soldier apparently conceded he didn’t know.

Roman Slaston, a farmer and general director of the Ukrainian Agribusiness Club, told NPR he’d heard reports of grain theft. “They steal grain and transport it to Crimea and then load on ships and transport to countries which do not ask about origin,” he said.

As if the blockades and alleged theft aren’t enough, Putin is bombing the country, in some cases indiscriminately, destroying crops even when he doesn’t necessarily mean to.

Following a call between Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Kremlin claimed Moscow was ready “to facilitate the unhindered sea transit of goods in coordination with Turkish partners,” but failed to specify which ports the nebulous pledge applied to.

Putin has repeatedly suggested this is Ukraine’s fault for mining the Black Sea and taking other steps to ward off the invasion, a ridiculous exercise in question-begging that could only emanate from the Kremlin. “There are several ways to export grain,” Putin said, during the interview mentioned here at the outset. He continued:

It was not Russia who mined the approaches to the port, it was Ukraine who mined it. I have already told all our colleagues many times: Let them clear mines, and let the ships loaded with grain leave the ports. We guarantee their peaceful passage without any problems into international waters. There is no problem. They must clear mines and raise ships from the bottom of the Black Sea that were deliberately sunk in order to make it difficult to enter these ports in southern Ukraine. We are ready to do this, we will not use the demining situation to launch any attacks from the sea.

So, to summarize, this is Ukraine’s fault because they attempted to protect their ports from an invading army, not the invaders’ fault for being there in the first place. Further, Ukraine should just remove the mines and other obstacles, which they can do safely because they have Putin’s word that he won’t take the opportunity to attack participating personnel. And since when has Putin ever lied about his intentions with regard to attacking Ukraine, right?

Putin had other suggestions. For example, he said Ukraine could move grain by rail, and while he admitted that comes with “certain technical problems,” including the use of different track gauges, he claimed solving those problems is “just a matter of a few hours.” That may be an optimistic timeline. In an interview with the Financial Times, Oleksandr Kubrakov, Ukraine’s infrastructure minister, said converting just one railway line to the EU standard gauge would cost between $2 billion and $3 billion. Typically, things that can be accomplished in “a few hours” with minimal effort don’t cost billions of dollars.

“It is possible to export grain from Ukraine through through Romania,” Putin continued. That’s problematic too, though. As the FT noted, “Russia has repeatedly bombed the alternative routes, including those leading to Romania.”

But don’t worry, Putin had still more ideas. “The simplest thing is to export through Belarus,” he told Rossiya 1. Belarus uses the same rail gauge as Ukraine, but Ukraine will be forgiven for distrusting Alexander Lukashenko. After all, he let Russia invade from Belarus.

Ultimately, Putin suggested it doesn’t much matter. The 20 million tons of wheat he claims isn’t trapped in Ukraine “is nothing” compared to the sum total of global wheat production. That’s misleading. What matters is Ukraine’s contribution to exports of wheat, and perhaps just as importantly, the impact of the war on prices.

Let’s pretend Putin is right. If it’s “nothing,” Ukraine and its allies are putting in a lot of work for nothing, engaged as they are in an increasingly desperate effort to get grain out of the war-torn country, both to free up space for the new harvest and to prevent people in food insecure locales from starving. Putin’s protestations notwithstanding, the logistics are a nightmare. In the same interview with the FT, Kubrakov said that despite “superhuman” efforts, improvements to alternative transportation routes “won’t cover even 20% of what we could do through the Black Sea ports.”

It’s also worth noting that markets seem likewise unconvinced of Putin’s “nothing” characterization. With the exception of a small uptick in the meat component, the cereals gauge was the only major subindex in the FAO’s Food Price Index to post a gain in May. Part of the rise was attributable to India’s wheat export ban, but as the FAO patiently explained, “the steep increase in wheat prices” was also at least partially due to “reduced production prospects in Ukraine because of the war.”

I’m not an expert on global agriculture, nor am I a farmer. But I do know that this isn’t as simple as calculating volumes and percentages and concluding there’s no crisis. Putin isn’t the only one to suggest fears are overblown, but every country’s needs are different when it comes to securing adequate food. Aggregates don’t capture that nuance by definition.

Besides that, price is important. Notwithstanding chip shortages, supply chain disruptions and limited production to ensure exclusivity, the primary impediment to universal Ferrari ownership isn’t supply. It’s price. When food prices soar, the idea that theoretically, there’s “plenty” of wheat somewhere, or that, in aggregate, Ukraine only accounts for this or that much, is small comfort to poor countries who can’t manage the cost or the logistics of securing it.

And don’t forget: Farmers need money too. If they can’t make it selling crops because someone is preventing the crops from getting to market, at least some of them may decide to do something else. As Slaston put it, “they definitely need money to buy fuel, to pay salaries and, yeah, to buy spare parts for combines.” And that assumes they’re not being shot at or their fields bombed.

If Putin doesn’t lift the blockade, it’s reasonable to suggest some existing crops could rot absent adequate storage capacity, which Kubrakov told the FT would cost billions to construct. Joe Biden is currently trying to “get temporary storage containers into the country [as] a stopgap measure,” CNN reported this week. The effort doesn’t sound particularly sophisticated. Administration officials mentioned “bags and boxes.”

I’d suggest we shouldn’t let the simple reality of this situation get lost in competing claims about specifics and statistics. Ukraine has grain. People around the world want that grain. Ukraine is a war zone. Generally speaking, it’s hard to get things out of war zones. Putin can rewrite, reimagine and reinterpret regional history all he wants, and spin paranoid NATO narratives all day, but nobody attacked Russia. No amount of obfuscation or propagandizing changes any of that.

Of course, at the end of the day, Putin doesn’t believe his own propaganda about the impact of Ukraine’s lost grain, even if he’s thoroughly convinced of his own deluded rationale for the invasion. He’s deliberately stoking fears of a global food crisis in a bid to extract concessions. Western sanctions are curtailing fertilizer supply, pushing up prices and imperiling crop yields. He figures he’ll make an already bad situation worse by cutting off a key supply of grain, all while claiming he’s doing no such thing, and blaming sanctions for the fertilizer shortage. Never mind the body count.