By Gabriela Baczynska
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union is seeking to transport more Ukrainian grains via road and rail to help make up for Russia’s withdrawal from a U.N.-backed Black Sea exports deal, the bloc’s leaders and officials said.
On Tuesday, Russia struck Ukrainian grain ports, a day after Moscow withdrew from a deal that allowed Ukrainian grain blocked by the Russia-Ukraine conflict to be exported safely.
“It means that hundreds of thousand of people around the world will be deprived of basic food,” the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, told reporters on Tuesday on the sidelines of the bloc’s summit with Latin America and the Caribbean.
“They are using hunger as a weapon. This is one of the worst things that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin could have done.”
A senior EU official said separately the bloc was supporting Turkey and the United Nations in efforts to bring Russia back to the agreement.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said the bloc would also respond by expanding land export routes for Ukrainian grains via the solidarity lanes, or road and rail links through Ukraine’s EU neighbours, as well as Moldova.
“There are other ways to get the grain out of Ukraine, for example through Romania and through Poland. If the Russians persist in this policy of preventing Ukraine from exporting grain and fertiliser, we will have to find other ways to get the grain out,” he told the same event in Brussels.
“What Russia’s done is very wrong, it’s not going to just affect people in Ukraine, it’s going to affect people in the poorest parts of the world.”
Before Russia attacked in February 2022, around three quarters of Ukraine’s grain production was exported to Europe, China and Africa, with the vast majority of grain and oilseeds going through Black Sea ports, according to the EU executive.
The Brussels-based European Commission said that has changed since Russia started the war and some 60% of Ukraine’s grain exports now pass through the EU’s solidarity lanes.
Expanding grain transit through the EU is sensitive for Poland and some other EU countries bordering Ukraine where local farmers have come under pressure from increased Ukrainian imports.
(Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska; editing by Barbara Lewis)
