Yesterday morning, Ukraine attacked the Kerch bridge, which connects Crimea with mainland Russia, an infrastructure that is both a supply line for Russian forces in the occupied peninsula and a passageway for Russian tourists in the summer. The explosions killed a couple who were driving to the peninsula and injured their fourteen-year-old daughter. Hours later, at noon, he announced that Russia will not revalidate the agreement that allows the export of Ukrainian grain, which expired at midnight yesterday, until the Russian part of the pact is fulfilled, that is, the supply to other Russian food and fertilizer markets.
The spokesman of the Kremlin, Dmitri Peskov, disassociated, however, the suspension of the attack on the Kerch bridge. "They are absolutely unrelated issues", he emphasized.
Russia had announced for some time that there was no reason to extend the agreement. The violations referred to by the Kremlin spokesman are the reconnection of the Russian agricultural bank, Rosselkhozbank, the Swift international payment system, the lifting of sanctions on the purchase of spare parts for agricultural machinery, the unblocking of transport insurance , the unfreezing of assets and the resumption of the Togliatti-Odesa Russian ammonia transport pipeline, which exploded on June 5.
Russian demands are contained in a memorandum signed between Russia and the UN, which Moscow considers mandatory. While Russian food and fertilizer exports are not subject to Western sanctions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has said restrictions on payments, logistics and insurance represent a barrier.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, mediator of the agreement together with the UN, declared yesterday that he will continue to try to reactivate it and was optimistic about the Russian president. "I think my friend Mr. Putin wants this humanitarian bridge (the grain corridor) to continue," the Turkish president told the press in Ankara shortly before starting a tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Union of Arab Emirates "Today (for yesterday) my Minister of Foreign Affairs will hold a conversation with his Russian counterpart. I hope we can reach a result and continue without interruption. In August we will have a meeting with Putin and we will take another step", he said. Erdogan thus referred to Putin's planned trip to Turkey in August and noted that, in any case, "I will have a telephone conversation with Putin when he returns from his trip" to the Arabian Peninsula.
Ukraine is a major producer of cereals and oilseeds, and the disruption of its exports when the war broke out pushed world food prices to record levels. The agreement of July 22, 2022 helped lower prices. Thus the world food crisis that the blockade of grain in Ukrainian Black Sea ports had caused was eased. Since then, the pact between Ukraine and Russia plus Turkey and the UN has been renegotiated three times, on occasions when Moscow threatened to paralyze it.
The news that Russia would suspend its participation in the agreement has already raised the prices of cereals and oilseeds. As a consequence, the increase will cause an increase in the prices of bread and pasta in the coming months. The situation, however, is better than in the months following the start of the war, since supplies of cereals from other producers, such as Brazil, have increased.
Wheat prices have fallen by around 14% since the beginning of the year and corn is down by around 23%. However, the current global food crisis is far from over. The World Food Program reported last month that multiple emergencies had overlapped, resulting in the largest and most complex humanitarian and hunger crisis in more than 70 years.
In 2022, 349 million people suffered from acute hunger and 772,000 were on the verge of starvation, according to this body. WFP has shipped 725,200 tonnes through the Black Sea Corridor this year. If this corridor is paralyzed, it will have to look elsewhere for grain, potentially at a higher cost when a funding shortfall has already forced it to scale back operations in some countries.
Ukraine has exported nearly 33 million tons of cereals, including 16.9 million tons of corn and 8.9 million tons of wheat. But the flow of grain may be coming to an end: The last ship from the deal left Ukraine on Sunday.
In this context, the Ukrainian attack on the Kertx bridge appears as a real challenge, the work of the intelligence services (SBU) and the Ukrainian navy. "It was difficult to reach the bridge, but in the end we succeeded", said a representative of the SBU quoted by the Ukrinform agency, who pointed out that the bridge is a legitimate target due to the fact that it was built in the territory busy Both the SBU and Russia's National Anti-Terrorism Committee confirmed that it was carried out using naval surface drones, that is, small remote-controlled boats loaded with explosives. According to Moscow, they were supplied by Western countries. Gray Zone, a Telegram channel linked to the Wagner group, noted that there were two attacks, at 3:04 a.m. and 3:20 a.m. on Monday.
The Russian governor of Crimea, Sergei Aksionov, reported an "emergency" in the area of the bridge's support pillar 145 and the suspension of car, rail and sea transport. He assured that the pillars remain intact, according to the TASS agency. The railway line was resumed in the morning, while ferry transport was suspended. Queues were several kilometers long at access to the bridge, and tourists were advised to use the alternative overland route from Rostov-on-Don to the peninsula via the coastal road that runs through the occupied Ukrainian cities of Mariupol, Berdiansk and Melitopol. To facilitate this, curfew hours will be reduced. There were also traffic breakdowns on this route yesterday. About 50,000 Russian tourists frequent Crimea, which has become a popular beach destination in Russia since annexation in 2014. With the start of the war, however, air connections were suspended. The couple who died in the attack yesterday came from the Russian region of Belgorod, next to the northern border of Ukraine. The 14-year-old daughter suffered head and torso injuries, but was out of danger.
The Kerch Bridge, the pride of Vladimir Putin's regime, was inaugurated by himself on May 15, 2018. On October 8, 2022, it was attacked for the first time with explosives, in a Ukrainian operation in which serve a truck bomb. Five people died.
