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Paisley played a song outside in the rain in Kyiv, posting a brief video of the moment.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Tag: Ukraine
Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with a bipartisan trio of senators in Ukraine that included Joe Manchin, Lisa Murkowski and Mark Kelly (along with country music star Brad Paisley).
Ukraine minister says India should recognise danger of rising impunity in neighbourhood
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First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Emine Dzhaparova New Delhi: Ukraine has indicated to India to recognise the danger of not stopping “impunity”, in an indirect reference to China and Pakistan.
As per reports, Emine Dzhaparova, Ukraine’s First Deputy Foreign Minister, told mediapersons at an interactive session held at the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) on Tuesday that India also has a difficult neighbourhood with China and Pakistan and the Crimea episode has a lesson for India too.
“Whenever impunity happens and if it is not stopped, it becomes bigger,” Dzhaparova was quoted as saying by reports.
Her comments could be seen as referring to India’s territorial disputes with China and Pakistan.
The Ukraine minister’s reference to Crimea was in relation to the events preceding the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.
Dzhaparova said that these developments could serve as an example of how to handle “difficult neighbours”.
She was further quoted as saying that “Ukraine really wants India and Ukraine to be closer. Yes, there is a history between us. But we want to start a new relationship with India”.
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#Ukraine #minister #India #recognise #danger #rising #impunity #neighbourhood( With inputs from www.siasat.com )
UK’s Truss warns of Western ‘weakness’ over China in wake of Macron visit
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LONDON — Former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss will take a not-so-subtle swipe at Emmanuel Macron over his attempt to build bridges with Beijing.
In a Wednesday morning speech to the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C. Truss will argue that too many in the West have “appeased and accommodated” authoritarian regimes in China and Russia.
And she will say it is a “sign of weakness” for Western leaders to visit China and ask premier Xi Jinping for his support in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — just days after Macron’s own high-profile trip there.
While Truss — who left office after just six weeks as crisis-hit U.K. prime minister — will not mention Macron by name, her comments follow an interview with POLITICO in which the French president said Europe should resist pressure to become “America’s followers.”
Macron said: “The question Europeans need to answer … is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction.”
Macron has already been criticized for those comments by the IPAC group of China-skeptic lawmakers, which said Monday his remarks were “ill-judged.”
And Truss — who had a frosty relationship with Macron during her brief stint in office last year — will use her speech to urge a more aggressive stance toward both China and Russia.
“We’ve seen Vladimir Putin launching an unprovoked attack on a free and democratic neighbor, we see the Chinese building up their armaments and their arsenal and menacing the free and democratic Taiwan,” Truss will say according to pre-released remarks. “Too many in the West have appeased and accommodated these regimes.”
She will add: “Western leaders visiting President Xi to ask for his support in ending the war is a mistake — and it is a sign of weakness. Instead our energies should go into taking more measures to support Taiwan. We need to make sure Taiwan is able to defend itself.”
Relations between Macron and Truss’ successor Rishi Sunak have been notably warmer. The pair hailed a “new chapter” in U.K.-France ties in March, after concluding a deal on cross-Channel migration.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )Europe’s eastern half claps back at Macron: We need the US
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Stop driving Europe away from the United States, dismayed central and eastern European officials fumed on Tuesday as French President Emmanuel Macron’s comments continued to ripple across the Continent.
Macron jolted allies in the EU’s eastern half after a visit to China last week when he cautioned the Continent against getting pulled into a U.S.-China dispute over Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own, imploring his neighbors to avoid becoming Washington and Beijing’s “vassals.”
The comments rattled those near the EU’s eastern edge, who have historically favored closer ties with the Americans — especially on defense — and pushed for a hasher approach to Beijing.
“Instead of building strategic autonomy from the United States, I propose a strategic partnership with the United States,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Tuesday before flying off to the U.S., of all places, for a three-day visit.
Privately, diplomats were even franker.
“We cannot understand [Macron’s] position on transatlantic relations during these very challenging times,” said one diplomat from an Eastern European country, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely express themselves. “We, as the EU, should be united. Unfortunately, this visit and French remarks following it are not helpful.”
The reactions reflect the long-simmering divisions within Europe over how to best defend itself. Macron has long argued for Europe to become more autonomous economically and militarily — a push many in Central and Eastern Europe fear could alienate a valuable U.S. helping keep Russia at bay, even if they support boosting the EU’s ability to act independently.
“In the current world of geopolitical shifts, and especially in the face of Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is obvious that democracies have to work closer together than ever before,” said another senior diplomat from Eastern Europe. “We should be all reminded of the wisdom of the first U.S ambassador to France Benjamin Franklin who rightly remarked that either we stick together or we will be hanged separately.”
Macron, a third senior diplomat from the same region huffed, was freelancing yet again: “It is not the first time that Macron has expressed views that are his own and do not represent the EU’s position.”
Walking into controversy
In his interview, Macron touched on a tense subject within Europe: how it should balance itself against the superpower fight between the U.S. and China.
The French president encouraged Europe to chart its own course, cautioning that Europe faces a “great risk” if it “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy.”
Macron said he wants Europe to become a “third pole” to counterbalance China and the U.S. in the long term | Pool photo by Jacques Witt/AFP via Getty Images It’s a stance that has many adherents within Europe — and has even worked its way into official EU policy as officials work to slowly ensure the Continent’s supply lines aren’t fully yoked to China and others on everything from weapons to electric vehicles.
Macron said he wants Europe to become a “third pole” to counterbalance China and the U.S. in the long term. An imminent conflict between Being and Washington, he argued, would put that goal at risk.
Yet out east, officials lamented that the French leader was simply treating the U.S. and China as if they were essentially the same in a global power play.
The comments, the second diplomat said, were “both ill-timed and inappropriate to put both the United States and China on a par and suggest that the EU should keep strategic distance to both of them.”
A Central European diplomat flatly dismissed Macron’s stance as “pretty outrageous,” while another official from the same region chalked it up to an attempt “to distract from other problems and show that France is bigger than what it is” — a reference to the protests roiling France amid Macron’s pension reforms.
The frustration in Central and Eastern Europe stems in part from a feeling that the French president has never made clear who would replace Washington in Europe — especially if Russia expands its war beyond Ukraine, said Kristi Raik, head of the foreign policy program at the International Centre for Defence and Security, a think tank in Estonia, a country of about 1.3 million people that borders Russia.
It’s an emotional point for Europe’s eastern half, where memories of the Soviet era linger.
“We hear Macron talking about European strategic autonomy, and somehow just being completely silent about the issue, which has become so clear in Ukraine, that actually European security and defense depends very strongly on the U.S.,” Raik said.
Raik noted, of course, that European countries, most notably Germany, are scrambling to update their militaries. France has also pledged large increases in its defense budgets.
But these changes, she cautioned, will take a “very long time.”
If Macron “wants to be serious in showing that he really aims at a Europe that is capable of defending itself,” Raik argued, “he also should be showing that France is willing to do much more to defend Europe vis-à-vis Russia.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )Germany can’t fulfill NATO obligations, says army chief in leaked memo
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BERLIN — Germany’s land forces cannot fulfill their NATO commitments, according to a leaked memo from a top soldier cited in a German media report.
A division that Germany promised to NATO isn’t fully ready for battle, Bild newspaper reported Tuesday, citing a routine “leadership message” from Alfons Mais, the army’s inspector general, to the armed forces’ inspector general.
The memo increases pressure on Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who is being confronted with the Bundeswehr’s structural problems that also faced his predecessors.
Berlin had promised a fully-equipped army division to NATO in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine as early as 2025, two years earlier than planned.
However, without countermeasures, “the army will not be able to hold its own in high-intensity combat and will also only be able to fulfill its obligations to NATO to a limited extent,” the army chief was quoted by the newspaper.
A spokesperson for the German defense ministry told POLITICO that it generally does not comment on “internal documents” and the “state of readiness.” However, the commitment for 2025 remains unchanged, the spokesperson added. The German army, the Bundeswehr’s land forces, declined to comment “on a classified document and its content.”
The operational readiness of a second division, which the Bundeswehr plans to provide from 2027, is also considered “unrealistic” according to the report, as the division will “not be sufficiently equipped with large-scale equipment in 2027.”
According to the report, Mais wrote that even pulling together all of the army’s assets would not make it possible to fully equip the 2025 division. The report cited continued underfunding and military support for Ukraine as strains that are already leading to a “clearly noticeable reduction in the army’s operational readiness.”
On the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Mais said on social media that the German land forces were “more or less bare” in view of the new threats.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )Russian soldiers are ‘beasts,’ Zelenskyy says over beheading video
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday condemned Russians forces as “beasts” over the execution of a Ukrainian soldier, who appeared to be beheaded while still alive in a video published on social media.
Zelenskyy’s reaction comes as Kyiv is ramping up diplomatic pressure over Moscow’s presence in international forums ranging from the U.N. Security Council to the Olympics.
“There is something that no one in the world can ignore: how easily these beasts kill,” the Ukrainian president said in a video posted on Twitter.
“This video, the execution of a Ukrainian captive, the world must see it,” he added. “This is a video of Russia as it is, what kind of creatures they are, there are no people for them: a son, a brother, a husband, someone’s child.”
In recent days, two videos have appeared. One supposedly filmed by Wagner group mercenaries shows the bodies of two Ukrainian soldiers, whose heads and hands were cut off, and appeared on pro-Russian social channels. Another — seeming shot in the summer — shows a Russian use a knife to sever the head of Ukrainian prisoner, who appears to be pleading with his killer.
Ukrainian social media and street conversations are charged with anger and pain as people discuss yet more potential evidence of a Russian war crime in Ukraine. Officials from the Defense Ministry of Ukraine asked people not to share the video to spare the feelings of the relatives of the soldier, who might recognize him on the video. Other soldiers, tweeting from the frontline express grief and anger.
“Each of us could and can be in the place of that guy whose head was cut off by the Russians,” Vitaly Ovcharenko, a Ukrainian serviceman from Donbas, tweeted.
And Yaryna Chornohuz, Ukrainian marine and combat medic currently serving near the frontline town of Bakhmut, claimed the Russians posted the decapitation video to trigger a feeling of defenselessness, and helplessness in the face of evil. She saw it as a sign of cowardice.
“It is important not to become like the enemy who commits atrocities, because that is what they are counting on. The enemy expects that we will also cut off heads, and they will feed it to their zombie population. Such videos are spread on purpose with this goal, to raise the degree of severity and take advantage of it,” Chornohuz said in a post.
POLITICO was not able to independently verify the videos.
Last month, another video showed a Ukrainian soldier saying “Slava Ukraini” (Glory to Ukraine) shortly before being executed by Russian troops.
Zelenskyy called on world leaders to act, saying “action [was] required now.”
“This is is not an accident, this is not an episode. This was the case before,” the Ukrainian president added.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba also reacted to the execution video, saying Russia, which is currently presiding over the United Nations Security Council, “must be kicked out of Ukraine and the UN, and be held accountable for [its] crimes.
Slovakia’s prime minister, Eduard Heger, also strongly condemned the execution, saying that the video shows Russia has “no legal or human limits in evil doing,” calling the beheading “ISIS style” and adding that this will be punished and not forgotten.
Ukrainian authorities have called for the creation of a special tribunal to rule over war crimes committed by Russian forces since the launch of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has already started an investigation into this alleged war crime. “We will find these non-humans. If necessary, we will get them wherever they are: from underground or from the other world. But they will definitely be punished for what they have done,” SBU Head Vasyl Malyuk said in a statement.
Moscow has denied committing war crimes in Ukraine — in spite of numerous reports showing otherwise, as well as the issuance of an arrest warrant last month against President Vladimir Putin over the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
“We are not going to forget anything. Nor are we going to forgive the murderers,” Zelenskyy said in his video address Wednesday.
Wilhelmine Preussen contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )Germany aims to ‘set the record straight’ on China after Macron’s Taiwan comments
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BERLIN — German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is heading to China to represent Berlin, but she’ll likely have more explaining to do about Paris in the wake of French President Emmanuel Macron’s explosive comments on Taiwan.
As Baerbock embarked on her two-day visit Wednesday evening, officials in Berlin were eager to stress that Germany and the EU care about Taiwan and stability in the region, arguing it’s mainly China that must contribute to de-escalation by refraining from aggressive military maneuvers close to the island nation.
Baerbock’s trip comes amid international backlash against Macron’s comments in an interview with POLITICO, arguing Europe should avoid becoming America’s follower, including on the matter of Taiwan’s security. Although German government spokespeople refused to comment directly on the French president’s remarks, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry specifically called out Beijing when expressing “great concern” over the situation in the Taiwan Strait.
“We expect all parties in the region to contribute to peace. That applies equally to the People’s Republic of China,” the spokesperson said, adding: “And it seems to us that actions such as military threatening gestures are counter to that goal and, in fact, increase the risk of unintended military clashes.”
Nils Schmid, the foreign policy spokesperson for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), said he expects Baerbock to “set the record straight” during her trip to China, which will involve meetings with Beijing’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang, Vice President Han Zheng and top diplomat Wang Yi.
“We clearly defined in the [government] coalition agreement that we need a changed China policy because China has changed. The chancellor made that clear during his visit. Above all, Scholz also issued clear warnings about Taiwan during his visit [last year],” Schmid wrote in a tweet. “I assume that Foreign Minister Baerbock will repeat exactly that and thus set the record straight and make a clarification after Macron’s botched visit.”
Berlin traditionally has been much more in sync with the U.S. on foreign and security policy than France has, which is why many politicians and officials in the German capital reacted with horror to Macron’s comments. The French president said Europe should not take its “cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” suggesting the EU stood between the two sides, rather than being aligned with its longtime democratic partners in Washington.
Macron gave the impression to some in the U.S. that Europeans see Beijing and Washington as “equidistant” from Brussels in terms of values and as allies, said SPD foreign policy lawmaker Metin Hakverdi, who is currently on a parliamentary visit to the U.S.
“That was foolish,” Hakverdi told POLITICO, adding that “Macron potentially damaged the peaceful status quo around Taiwan” by giving “the public impression that Europe has no particular interest in the conflict over Taiwan.
“The issue of Taiwan is not an internal matter for the People’s Republic of China. Anything else would virtually invite Beijing to attack Taiwan,” Hakverdi added. “I am confident that our foreign minister will make that clear during her trip to Asia — both to Beijing and to our Asian partners.”
Katja Leikert from the main German opposition party, the center-right CDU, criticized Macron’s comments as “extremely short-sighted,” and added: “Should China decide to strike Taiwan militarily, either by invading it or by starting a maritime blockade, this would have significant political and economic repercussions for us. We cannot just wish that away.
“What we actually need to do right now is strengthen our defense against aggressive measures from Beijing,” Leikert said.
For Berlin, Macron’s comments also come at a particularly bad moment for transatlantic ties. The German government is keen to mend cracks in its relationship with Washington that have emerged over the controversial benefits for U.S. businesses under Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Europe hopes to reach an agreement so that its own companies may also be eligible for these subsidies.
Macron’s comments “will not help in renegotiations on the Inflation Reduction Act, nor will they help Joe Biden in the election campaign against populist Republican candidates,” said the SPD’s Hakverdi.
The German foreign ministry spokesperson was quick to stress that both France and Germany were involved in shaping a joint EU-China policy | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images The German foreign ministry spokesperson was quick to stress that both France and Germany were involved in shaping a joint EU-China policy, which was also done in cooperation “with our transatlantic partner.”
During her trip to China, Baerbock plans to raise the situation in the Taiwan Strait; Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine; the human rights situation in China; as well as the fight against climate crisis, the spokesperson said.
Baerbock’s foreign ministry is also currently drafting Germany’s first China strategy. A draft of this seen by POLITICO last year vowed to take a much harder line toward Beijing. Baerbock and her Green party are at the forefront of pushing such a tougher position, while Scholz has long preferred a softer approach.
Incidentally, however, the German government said Wednesday it is reassessing whether to potentially take a firmer stance and ban Chinese state company Cosco from going through with a highly controversial move to buy parts of a Hamburg port terminal.
Scholz had strongly pushed for the port deal ahead of his own trip to Beijing last year, but the future of the transaction is now in doubt after German security authorities classified the terminal as “critical infrastructure.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )Poland’s Morawiecki plays Europe’s anti-Macron in Washington
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There’s an Emmanuel Macron-shaped shadow hovering over this week’s U.S. visit by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
In contrast to the French president — who in an interview with POLITICO tried to put some distance between the U.S. and Europe in any future confrontation with China over Taiwan and called for strengthening the Continent’s “strategic autonomy” — the Polish leader is underlining the critical importance of the alliance between America and Europe, not least because his country is one of Kyiv’s strongest allies in the war with Russia.
“Instead of building strategic autonomy from the United States, I propose a strategic partnership with the United States,” he said before flying to Washington.
In the U.S. capital, Morawiecki continued with his under-the-table kicks at the French president.
“I see no alternative, and we are absolutely on the same wavelength here, to building an even closer alliance with the Americans. If countries to the west of Poland understand this less, it is probably because of historical circumstances,” he said on Tuesday in Washington.
Unlike France, which has spent decades bristling at Europe’s reliance on the U.S. for its security, Poland is one of the Continent’s keenest American allies. Warsaw has pushed hard for years for U.S. troops to be stationed on its territory, and many of its recent arms contracts have gone to American companies. It signed a $1.4 billion deal earlier this year to buy a second batch of Abrams tanks, and has also agreed to spend $4.6 billion on advanced F-35 fighter jets.
“I am glad that this proposal for an even deeper strategic partnership is something that finds such fertile ground here in the United States, because we know that there are various concepts formulated by others in Europe, concepts that create more threats, more question marks, more unknowns,” Morawiecki said. “Poland is trying to maintain the most commonsense policy based on a close alliance with the United States within the framework of the European Union, and this is the best path for Poland.”
Fast friends
Poland has become one of Ukraine’s most important allies, and access to its roads, railways and airports is crucial in funneling weapons, ammunition and other aid to Ukraine.
That’s helped shift perceptions of Poland — seen before the war as an increasingly marginal member of the Western club thanks to its issues with violating the rule of law, into a key country of the NATO alliance.
Warsaw also sees the Russian attack on Ukraine as justifying its long-held suspicion of its historical foe, and it hasn’t been shy in pointing the finger at Paris and Berlin for being wrong about the threat posed by the Kremlin.
“Old Europe believed in an agreement with Russia, and old Europe failed,” Morawiecki said in a joint news conference with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. “But there is a new Europe — Europe that remembers what Russian communism was. And Poland is the leader of this new Europe.”
That’s why Macron’s comments have been seized on by Warsaw.
According to Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki, Emmanuel Macron’s talks of distancing the EU from America “threatens to break up” the block | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images “I absolutely don’t agree with President Macron. We believe that more America is needed in Europe … We want more cooperation with the U.S. on a partnership basis,” Marcin Przydacz, a foreign policy adviser to Polish President Andrzej Duda, told Poland’s Radio Zet, adding that the strategic autonomy idea pushed by Macron “has the goal of cutting links between Europe and the United States.”
While Poland is keen on European countries hitting NATO’s goal of spending at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense — a target that only seven alliance members, including Poland, but not France and Germany, are meeting — and has no problem with them building up military industries, it doesn’t want to weaken ties with the U.S., said Sławomir Dębski, head of the state-financed Polish Institute of International Affairs.
He warned that Macron’s talks of distancing Europe from America in the event of a conflict with China “threatens to break up the EU, which is against the interests not only of Poland, but also of most European countries.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )China must act against rising global hunger, new WFP boss McCain says
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BRUSSELS — China and other powerful countries need to step up to help steer the world away from a potentially “catastrophic” hunger crisis this year, the new head of the United Nations’ World Food Programme said.
Cindy McCain, an American diplomat and the widow of the late U.S. Senator John McCain, also told POLITICO that the EU and U.S. should see world hunger as a national security issue due to its impact on migration. She furthermore accused Russia of using hunger as a “weapon of war” by hindering exports of Ukrainian grain.
McCain, formerly the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. food agencies, took the helm of the WFP on April 5 and begins her five-year term at a time of increasing world hunger. The number of people facing food insecurity around the world rose to a record 345 million at the end of last year, up from 282 million in 2021, according to the WFP’s figures, as Russia’s war in Ukraine deepened a food crisis driven by climate change, COVID-19 and other conflicts.
This year could be worse still, McCain warned, with the Horn of Africa experiencing its worst drought in 40 years and Haiti facing a sharp rise in food insecurity, among other factors. “2023 is going to be catastrophic if we don’t get to work and raise the money that we need,” she said. “We need a hell of a lot more than we used to.”
Non-Western countries, which have traditionally contributed much less to the WFP, need to step up to meet the shortfall, McCain said, pointing specifically to China and oil-rich Gulf Arab countries. China contributed just $11 million to WFP funds last year, compared to $7.2 billion donated by the U.S.
“There are some countries that have just basically not participated or participated in a very low fashion. I’d like to encourage our Middle Eastern friends to step up to the plate a little more; I’d like to encourage China to step up to the plate a little more,” said McCain. “Every region, every country needs to step up funding.”
Her entreaty may fall on deaf ears, however, given rising geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. The WFP’s last six executive directors have been American, dating back to 1992, and Beijing may prefer to distribute aid through its own channels. Last summer, for example, China shipped food aid directly to the Horn of Africa following a drought there.
National security
Countries hesitant to throw more money into food aid should think about the alternative, McCain said, particularly those in Europe that are likely to bear the brunt of any new wave of migration from Africa and the Middle East.
“Food security is a national security issue,” she said. “No refugee wants to leave their home country, but they’re forced to because they don’t have enough food, and they can’t feed their families. So it comes down to if you want a stable world, food is a major player in this.”
The WFP is already having to make brutal decisions despite raking in a record $14.2 billion last year — more than double what it raised in 2017. In February, for instance, it said a funding shortfall was forcing it to cut food rations for Rohingya refugees living in camps in Bangladesh.
The problem is compounded by surging costs following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, which sent already-high food prices soaring further, as grain and oilseed exports through Ukraine’s Black Sea ports plunged from more than 5 million metric tons a month to zero.
A U.N.-brokered deal allowing Ukrainian grain exports to pass through Russia’s blockades in the Black Sea has brought some reprieve, but Moscow’s repeated threats to withdraw from the agreement have kept prices volatile.
Moscow claims that “hidden” Western sanctions are hindering its fertilizer and foods exports and causing hunger in the Global South | Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images The deal, initially brokered in July last year, was extended for 120 days last month; Russia, however, agreed to extend its side of the Black Sea grain initiative only for 60 days. Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov threatened, once again, to halt Moscow’s participation in the initiative unless obstacles to its own fertilizer and food exports are addressed.
Moscow claims that “hidden” Western sanctions — those targeting Russia’s fertilizer oligarchs and its main agricultural bank, as well as others excluding Russian banks from the international SWIFT payments system — are hindering its fertilizer and foods exports and causing hunger in the Global South.
Ukraine and its Western allies have countered that Russia is deliberately holding up inspections for ships heading to and from its Black Sea ports, creating a backlog of Ukraine-bound vessels off the Turkish coast and inflating prices.
These delayed food cargoes are hindering the WFP’s ability to respond to humanitarian crises, said McCain, who did not hold back on the issue.
“Let’s be very clear, there are no sanctions on [Russian] fertilizer,” she said. “It is not sanctioned and never has been sanctioned.”
Russia is “using hunger as a weapon of war,” said McCain. “it’s unconscionable that a country would do that — any country, not just Russia.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )Ukraine’s bumper grain exports rile allies in eastern EU
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Ukraine’s farmers played an iconic role in the first weeks of Russia’s invasion, towing away abandoned enemy tanks with their tractors.
Now, though, their prodigious grain output is causing some of Ukraine’s staunchest allies to waver, as disrupted shipments are redirected onto neighboring markets.
The most striking is Poland, which has played a leading role so far in supporting Ukraine, acting as the main transit hub for Western weaponry and sending plenty of its own. But grain shipments in the other direction have irked Polish farmers who are being undercut — just months before a national election where the rural vote will be crucial.
Diplomats are floundering. After a planned Friday meeting between the Polish and Ukrainian agriculture ministers was postponed, the Polish government on Saturday announced a ban on imports of farm products from Ukraine. Hungary late Saturday said it would do the same.
Ukraine is among the world’s top exporters of wheat and other grains, which are ordinarily shipped to markets as distant as Egypt and Pakistan. Russia’s invasion last year disrupted the main Black Sea export route, and a United Nations-brokered deal to lift the blockade has been only partially effective. In consequence, Ukrainian produce has been diverted to bordering EU countries: Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
At first, those governments supported EU plans to shift the surplus grain. But instead of transiting seamlessly onto global markets, the supply glut has depressed prices in Europe. Farmers have risen up in protest, and Polish Agriculture Minister Henryk Kowalczyk was forced out earlier this month.
Now, governments’ focus has shifted to restricting Ukrainian imports to protect their own markets. After hosting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Warsaw in early April, Polish President Andrzej Duda said resolving the import glut was “a matter of introducing additional restrictions.”
The following day, Poland suspended imports of Ukrainian grain, saying the idea had come from Kyiv. On Saturday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, after an emergency cabinet meeting, said the import ban would cover grain and certain other farm products and would include products intended for other countries. A few hours later, the Hungarian government announced similar measures. Both countries said the bans would last until the end of June.
The European Commission is seeking further information on the import restrictions from Warsaw and Budapest “to be able to assess the measures,” according to a statement on Sunday. “Trade policy is of EU exclusive competence and, therefore, unilateral actions are not acceptable,” it said.
While the EU’s free-trade agreement with Ukraine prevents governments from introducing tariffs, they still have plenty of tools available to disrupt shipments.
Neighboring countries and nearby Bulgaria have stepped up sanitary checks on Ukrainian grain, arguing they are doing so to protect the health of their own citizens. They have also requested financial support from Brussels and have already received more than €50 million from the EU’s agricultural crisis reserve, with more money on the way.
Restrictions could do further harm to Ukraine’s battered economy, and by extension its war effort. The economy has shrunk by 29.1 percent since the invasion, according to statistics released this month, and agricultural exports are an important source of revenue.
Cracks in the alliance
The trade tensions sit at odds with these countries’ political position on Ukraine, which — with the exception of Hungary — has been strongly supportive. Poland has taken in millions of Ukrainian refugees, while weapons and ammunition flow in the opposite direction; Romania has helped transport millions of tons of Ukrainian corn and wheat.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Poland’s Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki | Omar Marques/Getty Images Some Western European governments, which had to be goaded by Poland and others into sending heavy weaponry to Kyiv, are quick to point out the change in direction.
“Curious to see that some of these countries are [always] asking for more on sanctions, more on ammunition, etc. But when it affects them, they turn to Brussels begging for financial support,” said one diplomat from a Western country, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Some EU countries also oppose the import restrictions for economic reasons. For instance, Spain and the Netherlands are some of the biggest recipients of Ukrainian grain, which they use to supply their livestock industries.
Politically, though, the Central and Eastern European governments have limited room for maneuver. Poland and Slovakia are both heading into general elections later this year. Bulgaria has had a caretaker government since last year. Romania’s agriculture minister has faced calls to resign, including from a compatriot former EU agriculture commissioner.
And farmers are a strong constituency. Poland’s right-wing Law & Justice (PiS) party won the last general election in 2019 thanks in large part to rural voters. The Ukrainian grain issue has already cost a Polish agriculture minister his job; the government as a whole will have to tread carefully to avoid the same fate.
This article has been updated.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
