Kyiv | Hours after accusing Ukraine of attacking its ships with a swarm of underwater drones, Russia withdrew on Saturday from an agreement aimed at bringing down global food prices by allowing the export of grain from Ukrainian ports.
The Russian decision, which United Nations and Ukrainian officials said could exacerbate hunger, brought to a screeching halt a rare case of wartime coordination that had allowed the movement of more than 9 million tons of agricultural products, many of them bound for poor countries.
Stephane Dujarric, a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, called on the warring parties to ensure that the grain deal continued.
“It is vital that all parties refrain from any action that would imperil the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which is a critical humanitarian effort that is clearly having a positive impact on access to food for millions of people around the world,” Dujarric said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Russia’s decision “predictable,” saying in his nightly address on Saturday that Russia had been “deliberately aggravating” the food crisis since September.
“Russia is doing everything to ensure that millions of Africans, millions of residents of the Middle East and South Asia, find themselves in conditions of artificial famine or at least a severe price crisis,” he said, urging a strong international response.
“The world has the power to protect people against this,” he added.
Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the US National Security Council, said that by suspending the grain agreement, Russia would “again be trying to use the war it started as a pretext for weaponising food”.
The size of Saturday’s attack and the extent of the damage it caused remained unclear.
In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Ukraine of launching “massive air and sea strikes using drones” on its Black Sea Fleet’s ships, infrastructure and naval base in the port city of Sevastopol.
That meant, the ministry said, that Russia could no longer ensure the security of cargo ships taking grain from Ukrainian ports and so would “suspend its implementation from today for an indefinite period.”
Russian officials said earlier Saturday that 16 drones had attacked Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, damaging at least one vessel, a minesweeper, before all of the attacking aircraft were repelled. The Russian Defence Ministry accused “the Kyiv regime” of carrying out the operation but did not initially mention any civilian vessels.
The Black Sea Fleet has released devastating volleys of ship-fired missiles across the breadth of Ukraine, carrying out some of the deadliest strikes of the war.
Ukrainian officials did not comment publicly on the attack and have maintained a policy of official ambiguity about strikes behind the front lines.
But a senior Ukrainian official said the minesweeper Ivan Golubtsov had been severely damaged, possibly beyond repair. A second ship, Admiral Makarov, sustained damage to the hull that could easily be fixed, the official said.
The attack appeared to be the most recent example of Ukrainian forces striking sensitive Russian sites from afar, illustrating how homemade drones and powerful weapons provided by Western nations have given the Ukrainians abilities that only the Russians had early in the war.
Saturday’s drone attack struck Sevastopol, a port on the Crimean Peninsula, which has been under Kremlin control since Moscow illegally annexed it in 2014.
The area holds immense symbolic importance for Putin. An explosion this month on the bridge linking the peninsula to Russia prompted Putin to retaliate with mass strikes across Ukraine that killed dozens of people and targeted critical infrastructure.
Ukrainian officials have continued to accuse Russian forces of harsh treatment of local populations in occupied parts of southern and eastern Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said that Russia was transforming the once thriving southern port city of Kherson into a wasteland, accusing the Russians of stealing ambulances, closing healthcare facilities and threatening doctors.
“Russia is turning the Kherson region into a zone without civilisation,” he said in his nightly address to the nation Friday. “They are dismantling the entire health care system there.”