Russia on Thursday stepped up its airstrikes on Ukrainian ports critical to the world’s food supply, as the White House warned that the Kremlin had mined sea lanes and could set the stage for attacks on commercial shipping.
Moscow has already instructed shipping companies to cross the Russian blockade in the Black Sea at their own peril and may be considered military targets. The warning comes days after Russia pulled out of a multilateral deal that allowed much-needed Ukrainian grain onto the world market.
In a further sign of rising tensions, Ukraine issued its own warning on Thursday: the defense ministry said ships bound for Russian ports or ports in occupied Ukraine will now be considered to be carrying “military cargo with all the corresponding risks”.
In Washington, a White House official accused Moscow at a news conference of engaging in a false flag operation to blame Ukraine if Russia attacked the ship. The water where Russia is said to have placed the mines is in an area Ukraine has already mined to prevent amphibious attacks.
A White House official, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, pointed to Russia’s release a day earlier of a video showing what it claimed was the discovery and detonation of a Ukrainian sea mine.
“We believe this is a concerted effort to justify any attack against civilian vessels in the Black Sea and then blame them on Ukraine,” Mr Kirby said.
Despite Moscow’s own warnings to shipping outfits, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov on Thursday denied any intention to attack civilian vessels, state media said.
Ukrainian ports are not the only place where Russia and its allies are flexing their muscles.
A week and a half after Sweden secured a deal to join NATO, its expansion angered the Kremlin, Belarus, a close Russian ally, said 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 Russian news media noted is near the border with Finland, a new member of NATO.
A grain deal reached last summer is perhaps the only bright spot in a bleak year and a half of conflict, reducing the threat of famine in countries dependent on Ukrainian exports. With the deal apparently dead, wheat prices have soared, jumping 12 percent since Monday.
However fierce the posture of both sides, analysts say widespread hostilities in the Black Sea are unlikely.
“The Russians’ primary goal is to undercut the Ukrainian economy, and if they can do that without firing a shot, they’ll be happy,” said Siddharth Kaushal, a sea power research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense and security research group.
He said the basic calculation for Russia has not changed: to damage Ukraine’s economy and free it from Western sanctions without prolonging an already stumbling war.
“You could say it’s a show of weakness in the broadest strategic sense of the word, right?” Mr. Kaushal said. “The need to focus on things like eroding Ukraine’s economy reflects the fact that they can’t make headway on the ground the way they thought they could this time last year. “
Analysts said Russia’s strategy is to use threats against commercial shipping to raise insurance premiums, saying the financial pain would cut grain shipments and force the West to make concessions on some sanctions that stifle Russian trade.
Now, the question is whether commercial ships are at risk of plying the Black Sea, what the insurance premiums will be, and whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be able to find alternative routes for the country’s grain.
Before breaking the grain deal, Ukraine increased exports by truck, rail and riverboats. Now, with grain blocked at ports again, it will be able to export more wheat, corn, barley and sunflower seeds through alternative routes, Dutch bank Rabobank said on Thursday. But transport costs will become more expensive and rail infrastructure is at greater risk of Russian attack, experts said.
After pulling out of a grain deal on Monday, Russia has launched a series of attacks on the Ukrainian port cities of Odesa and Mykolaiv, targeting some grain export infrastructure, Ukrainian officials say.
In Chornomorsk, south of Odessa, 60,000 tons of grain waiting to be loaded onto ships were destroyed, according to Ukraine’s agriculture minister. This 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 not only had Russia pulled out of the grain deal, “but they were burning grain.”
“What we already know is that this is going to create a big, big food crisis in the world,” he told reporters before an EU meeting in Brussels.
Both ports were hit again on Thursday.
At least 19 people, including a child, were injured in Mykolayiv, not far from the Black Sea estuary, after an explosion broke out in a residential building, according to Vitaly Kim, head of the regional military administration.
Nearby, Odessa, already reeling from two nights of some of the biggest attacks on the city since the start of the war, was targeted anew as a result of a large fire in the city center, according to regional military administrators. Oleh Kiper, Odesa’s regional governor, posted on the Telegram messaging app that at least one person was found dead under the rubble of the destroyed building.
The US warning about Russian actions in the Black Sea is somewhat reminiscent of the warnings the White House made in the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when officials repeatedly said there were signs of an impending attack in hopes of deterring it. He later took a similar approach when it appeared that China was considering supplying Russia with weapons of war.
On Thursday, speaking to reporters, Mr. Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said, “We thought it was important to sound that warning and clarify what we were seeing and what we believe Russia is really up to here.”
The report was contributed Matthew Mpok Big, Victoria Kim, Ivan Nechepurenko And Jenny Gross.
