Russia on Thursday stepped up its airstrikes against Ukrainian ports critical to the world’s food supply, as the White House warned that the Kremlin has been laying mines on sea routes and may be setting the stage for attacks on commercial transport ships.
Moscow has already warned shipping companies that they are now crossing the Russian blockade in the Black Sea at their own risk and could be treated as military targets. The warning came days after Russia pulled out of a multinational deal that had brought much-needed Ukrainian grain to the world market.
In a further sign of rising tensions, Ukraine issued its own warning on Thursday: Ships going to Russian ports or to ports in occupied Ukraine, the defense ministry said, will now be considered “military cargo, with all the associated risks”.
In Washington, a White House official accused Moscow at a news conference of being involved in a false flag operation to involve Ukraine if Russia attacked a ship. The waters where Russia is said to have placed the mines lie in an area already mined by Ukraine to deter an amphibious assault.
White House official John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, pointed to Russia’s release a day earlier of a video showing the detection and detonation of a Ukrainian naval mine.
“We believe this is rather a coordinated effort to justify attacks on civilian ships in the Black Sea and then blame them on Ukraine,” Kirby said.
Despite Moscow’s own warnings to naval equipment, Russia’s ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov denied on Thursday that it had any intention to attack civilian ships, state media said.
Ukrainian ports were not the only place where Russia and its allies flexed their muscles.
A week and a half after Sweden struck a deal to join NATO, whose expansion has angered the Kremlin, Belarus, a close Russian ally, said on Thursday that mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner group were training troops on the border with Poland, a member of the Western military alliance.
And President Vladimir V. Putin traveled to the Russian city of Murmansk – which the Russian news media pointed out is close to the border with Finland, NATO’s newest member.
The grain deal, reached last summer, may have been the only bright spot in a bleak year-and-a-half of conflict that eased the threat of famine in countries dependent on Ukrainian exports. With the apparent demise of the deal, wheat prices have soared, rising 12 percent since Monday.
Fierce as the stance on both sides was, analysts said widespread hostilities in the Black Sea seemed unlikely.
“The Russians’ primary goal is to undermine the Ukrainian economy, and if they could do that without firing a shot, they would be delighted,” said Sidharth Kaushal, a naval research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense and security research group.
The basic calculation for Russia, he said, has not changed: harm Ukraine’s economy and free itself from Western sanctions without extending a war in which it is already stumbling.
“You could say it’s a show of weakness in the broader strategic sense of the word, right?” said Mr. Kaushal. “The need to focus on things like erode Ukraine’s economy reflects the fact that they can’t move forward on the ground in the way they thought they could at this time last year. ”
Russia’s strategy is to use the threats against commercial shipping to drive up insurance premiums, hoping the financial pain will cut off grain shipments and force the West to compromise on some of the sanctions that hinder Russian trade, analysts said.
Now the question is whether commercial ships risk crossing the Black Sea, what the insurance premiums are and whether Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, will be able to find alternative routes for the country’s grain.
Before the grain deal was closed, Ukraine increased exports by truck, train and barge. Now that the grain is once again blocked at ports, it will probably still be able to export most of its wheat, corn, barley and sunflower seeds via alternative routes, Rabobank, a Dutch bank, said on Thursday. But transportation costs will become more expensive and rail infrastructure will be at greater risk of Russian attacks, experts say.
Since withdrawing from the grain deal on Monday, Russia has launched a series of attacks on the Ukrainian port cities of Odessa and Mykolaiv, some of which appear to target grain export infrastructure, Ukrainian officials say.
In Chornomorsk, just south of Odessa, 60,000 tons of grain waiting to be loaded onto ships has been destroyed, according to Ukraine’s agriculture minister. That is enough to feed more than 270,000 people for a year, according to the World Food Programme.
Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, said Russia has not only pulled out of the grain deal, “but they are burning the grain.”
“What we already know is that this is going to cause a big, massive food crisis in the world,” he told reporters ahead of an EU meeting in Brussels.
Both ports were hit again on Thursday.
At least 19 people, including a child, were injured in Mykolaiv, a short distance from a Black Sea estuary, after an explosion set fire to a residential building, Vitaly Kim, the head of the regional military administration, said.
Nearby Odessa, already reeling from two nights of some of the biggest attacks on the city since the start of the war, was targeted again, resulting in a major fire in the city center, according to the regional military administrator. At least one person has been found dead under the rubble of a destroyed building, Odessa regional governor Oleh Kiper said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
The US warning of Russian actions in the Black Sea was somewhat reminiscent of that issued by the White House in the months leading up to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when officials repeatedly said there were signs of an imminent attack in hopes of averting it. They later took a similar approach when it emerged that China was considering supplying Russia with arms for the war.
On Thursday, Mr Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters: “We felt it was important to sound that warning and make it clear what we see and what we think Russia is really up to here.”
Reporting contributed by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Victoria Kim, Ivan Nechepurenko And Jenny Gross.
