In Odesa, Strategic Callousness

On Friday, there was “a beacon on the Black Sea.”

So said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who, along with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, shepherded a tenuous deal to free some 20 million tons of trapped Ukrainian grain over the finish line after difficult talks in Istanbul. The agreement, Guterres declared, was “a beacon of hope, a beacon of possibility, a beacon of relief.”

As it turns out, the beacons Guterres saw were actually cruise missiles. Less than 24 hours after Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu signed the agreement on Russia’s behalf, Vladimir Putin attacked Odesa, underscoring the contention that Moscow can’t be trusted to honor its commitments.

In what US ambassador Bridget Brink described as an “outrageous” strike, two Kalibr cruise missiles slammed into the blockaded port on Saturday. Videos depicting the attack were scattered across social media platforms. In one, shared by the verified account of an ABC reporter currently in Ukraine, smoke billowed from an area between shipping containers.

“The blast wave from the missiles hitting the port could be felt from miles away,” The New York Times said. Two more rockets were intercepted by Ukraine’s air defense systems, according to messages posted to Telegram and Facebook by local military officials.

Condemnations poured in from around the world, the majority of which accused the Kremlin of cruel duplicity. I’d be inclined to call it strategic callousness. It wasn’t clear that Russia targeted grain infrastructure. That matters. As the Times noted, Moscow made no promises regarding “parts of Ukrainian ports not directly used for grain exports.” If there were military targets in the vicinity, the Kremlin could claim (however implausibly) that strikes don’t violate the letter of the Istanbul accord.

They certainly violate the spirit of the deal, though, and, as Ukrainian agriculture minister Mykola Solskyi reminded the Times on Saturday, “If you attack a port, you attack everything.” “It doesn’t matter what you hit,” he said. “You use a lot of the same infrastructure for oil [and] grain.”

Moscow knows that, of course. The Kremlin, lacking the strategic military wherewithal to overwhelm and occupy the entire country (or at least without employing brute force tactics that chance direct conflict with NATO), has repeatedly resorted to flagrant demonstrations of wanton faithlessness. When combined with a maritime monopoly and a stranglehold on regions Putin reportedly plans to annex, Russia cobbled together something loosely akin to “control” over a situation which, when measured against Moscow’s initial goals in Ukraine, can only be described as a total debacle.

The grain deal will proceed, but Saturday’s strikes dealt a figurative and literal blow to an arrangement facilitators, including the UN, were keen to present as a partial solution to the world’s burgeoning food crisis.

A UN gauge of global prices fell for a third straight month in June, but remains extraordinarily elevated (figure above).

Putin has suggested, on a number of occasions, that Ukraine is responsible for the curtailment of seaborne grain. “The problem of exporting grain from Ukraine does not exist,” he told Russian state television early last month. “Let them clear mines, and let the ships loaded with grain leave the ports.”

He was referring to measures taken by Ukraine to impede the Russian military and repel the initial invasion. The Kremlin would have you believe 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.

Read more: Putin’s War Becomes Putin’s Food Crisis

Prices for commodities ranging from wheat to oil have retreated from dizzying heights scaled in the wake of Russia’s invasion. Wheat futures slid to the lowest since February on Friday.

The UN’s gauge of cereal prices notched one of the largest monthly gains on record in March (red dot in the figure, below). Although the index fell 4% in June from May, it was 27% higher from the same time last year, and the current period of 12-month price increases counts as the most acute since the Arab Spring.

Some of the recent relief in wheat prices may be attributable to Russia’s plundering of Ukrainian grain. Shipments of food from Crimea are up fiftyfold. Since March, more than 450,000 tons of grains, oilseeds, vegetable oils and other goods have departed Sevastopol (which is sanctioned), according to Geneva-based AgFlow. That figure was just 8,000 tons last year.

The missile strikes on Odesa plainly suggest Putin won’t allow the grain arrangement to create a sense of normalcy. The Times described the port as “frozen in time” — a place where “bails of steel remain stacked on loading docks ready for shipping, and multicolored cranes sit inert like huge slumbering birds.” There were at least 10 explosions in the city on Saturday.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, Oleg Nikolenko, suggested the attack was tantamount to Putin “spitting in the face” of Turkey’s Erdogan. The UN, an institution which, by design, is incapable of deterring aggression on the part of major world powers (including, by the way, US aggression), said it’s “imperative” the grain accord be implemented in full.

On Friday, while in Istanbul, Shoigu reiterated Russia’s pledge not to exploit the situation for military advantage. “We have made this commitment,” he said.