> The war wouldn’t be such a problem if Ukraine received proper anti-ship missiles.
That's very difficult to say, actually; the Moskova was sunk with them after all, but the bigger issue is the abhorrent and indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations by the Russians. Fields with farmers and homes and hospitals with civilians are not of military importance. And yet, Russia keeps shooting them.
The truth is Putin's Kremlin is to blame for this wide-spread shortage and upcoming famine in many regions of the World, the West should just take the funds they seized as seed money to grow wheat in Africa this season even if it's a loss to offset this massive lost in cultivation in Ukraine.
For what it's worth, planting is still taking place [0], it's just being disrupted and will not be as large of a grow as it was prior to the invasion, so the yields will be reduced. I have it on good authority that in Lviv Oblast, specifically in Trasncarpathia things are still going into the ground as planned since Spring.
The problem is that Russia has a sea blockade not allowing Ukrainian ships with grain to leave ports. That's where the missiles could help.
(in the same time Russia sells stolen from Ukraine grain itself).
No, growing is definitely going to be an issue, as is storing it because Russia has been targeting Grain silos, too.
The transportation aspect is a critical issue, too, but one would like to think that as Russia is being pushed back to the border that the center and West will be able to transport to Poland/Romania to enter EU markets by the time harvest occurs in the Fall.
The main issue is that Russia keeps attacking civilian targets as well as Military ones, the recent bombing in Lviv also struck and damaged the trains [0].
Again, the sanctions on Russian oil need to be swift and deceive if this is going to stop anytime soon, they are losing nearly $1 billion per day of the illegal war in Ukraine. This only possible because of the few EU nations holding out on a total withdraw from Russian energy. I get the implications are dire, but this is the reality of countries like Germany and Italy building their entire economies around Russian energy, but this is what will shift the West to renewables more than anything else in my lifetime. So, short term pain but long term thinking needs to be put into place.
Summer is here, and it's already clear to me that it's no different than what we've had since COVID started the numbers look remarkably the same and the recession is showing.
I just hope that we make progress in this area and we can justify the last 3 years by making a massive leap towards renewable energy being at the core of energy useage.
Ukrainian grain exports used to be tens of millions of tonnes per year. That's something like a million semitrucks or a million railway cars. You can't build that kind of capacity in a few months, especially not in the middle of an all-out war.
As long as Russia can operate submarines in the Black Sea, it can blockade Ukrainian ports. No foreign cargo ship will approach the ports, and no foreign insurer will insure such ships.
Ukraine also depended on Russian energy. If Europe wants to phase out Russian energy imports, it can't supply enough fuel to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukraine has better uses for the fuel it can get than exporting low-value bulk goods. Like keeping its military operational, which also needs the trucks that could export grain.
Ukraine uses the Soviet 1520 mm rail gauge, while its western neighbors use the 1435 mm gauge. That creates a huge bottleneck for rail transport. Not to mention that Russia has been targeting Ukrainian railway infrastructure.
There are not that many major roads from Ukraine to the west, and some of them are unusable. The border between Moldova and Ukraine is largely controlled by Russian-backed separatists, while Russia has been bombing the bridges on the only road south of Moldova repeatedly.
I agree, but, as a person who has a background in supply chain, it's entirely moot if their is no yield to transport; I think what's significant here, is that occupation poses the largest threat.
> That's very difficult to say, actually; the Moskova was sunk with them after all, but the bigger issue is the abhorrent and indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations by the Russians. Fields with farmers and homes and hospitals with civilians are not of military importance. And yet, Russia keeps shooting them.
According to western media.
> The truth is Putin's Kremlin is to blame for this wide-spread shortage
Yeah that would be easy, however it's not as cut and dry (it rarely is). You could as easily blame Zelenskyy for killing thousands of east Ukrainians prior. And then their is the coup d'état in 2014 as well and the constant provocations of the NATO in general. So I am not so sure that Putin's Kremlin alone is to blame.
Almost everything being put out now is propaganda for someone. Not sure why anyone would trust western media but the alternative certainly isn't to trust RT, Sputnik, or any of their sibling media outlets either. Anyone who thinks they've got a good handle on the situation in Ukraine is living in a bubble of wishful thinking. Eventually the physical world will win out regardless of what the Metaverse and cyberspace presents as being true.
The theory is that the Ukranians would use those missiles to clear the Black Sea blockade and then they would be able to resume shipping grain, grain-precursors, and other goods as they did before the war. There's more to the situation than that, so it's impossible to say if that would be enough, unfortunately, but that's the theory.
