A convoy of trucks bearing the Russian identity marker “Z,” allegedly laden with Ukrainian grain, Zaphorizia, April 29 (Oksana Ostapchuk / Twitter)
Working with vessel tracking experts at and satellite imaging company Planet Labs, the AP has identified a bulker believed to be carrying stolen Ukrainian grain at the port of Latakia, Syria.
Ukrainian officials claim that the Russian bulker Matros Pozynich is carrying a cargo of 27,000 tonnes of grain from Russian-occupied territories. According to AIS data provided by Pole Star, the Pozynich repeated a round-trip itinerary to and from the Black Sea to Syrian waters twice in March and April, returning to Syriaon May 5. There are extensive gaps in her AIS record during these voyages, indicating periods when her transponder was turned off.
According to Ukrainian officials, the Pozynich loaded a cargo of Ukrainian-origin grain in Russian-occupied Crimea on hermost recent trip to the Black Sea, and the vessel attempted to deliver it to a buyer in Alexandria, Egypt. After an appeal by the Ukrainian government, Egyptian authorities refused to allow the vessel to enter, and the Pozynich diverted to a port in Russia-aligned Syria instead. The AP reports that the Pozynich has been identified at a pier in Latakia by satellite imagery.
According to Ukrainian industry outlet ProAgro, Ukraine’s military intelligence believes that stolen Ukrainian grain will be processed through Syria and smuggled out to neighboring Middle Eastern countries.
The scale of the alleged theft is significant. Ukrainian Deputy Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskiy said last week that about 440,000 tonnes of grain have been taken from the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization official Josef Schmidhuber confirmed last week that there is “anecdotal evidence” of Russian forces “looting the storage grain that is available,” destroying storage facilitiesand stealing farm equipment.
“I personally hear this from many silo owners in the occupied territory. This is outright robbery. And this is happening everywhere in occupied territory,” Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Mykola Solskiy asserted last month.
Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov has denied that Russian forces are extracting grain from Ukraine. In a social media post Wednesday, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin went a step further and falsely accused the United States of the same offense. “Washington has no confidence that Kiev will win. They have been thinking up ways of recovering their funds, while setting the stage for a famine in Ukraine,” he claimed, without providing evidence. State television programming recently beganbroadcasting a similar narrative for the Russiandomestic audience (below).
During a previous round of Russian governorship in the early 1930s, Soviet forces carried out a systematic program of food removal and denial in Ukraine, creating aman-made famine that killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people.
