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A small army of combine harvesters rolled across an endless farm field on a recent afternoon in western Ukraine, kicking dust clouds into the blue sky as the machines gathered in a sea of golden wheat. Mountains of soy and corn will be reaped in coming weeks. It will all add to a 20-million-ton backlog of grain that has been trapped in Ukraine during Russias grinding war.

Under a breakthrough deal brokered last week by the United Nations and Turkey, Moscows blockade of Ukraines grain shipments through the Black Sea would be lifted. If all goes to plan, a vessel loaded with grain will sail from a Ukrainian port in coming days, releasing harvests from a major breadbasket to a hungry world.

But despite fanfare in Brussels and Washington, the accord is being greeted cautiously in the fields of Ukraine. Farmers who have lived for months under the risk of Russian missile attacks and economic uncertainty are skeptical that a deal will hold.

The roar of the combines on these fields is a familiar racket this time of year, but much of the harvest will go straight into storage.

The opening of the Black Sea ports is not by itself the magic answer, said Georg von Nolcken, chief executive of Continental Farmers Group, a large agro-business with vast tracts around western Ukraine. Its definitely a step forward, but we cant assume that the deal will bring Ukraine back to where it was before the war, he said.

The blockage has ignited wild price swings for crops and the cost of transporting them. Storage is running out for the latest harvests, leaving many scrambling for makeshift solutions.

A missile strike on Saturday that hit Odesa, Ukraines biggest Black Sea port, jolted confidence in the deal and risked undermining the effort before the agreement could even be put into action.

No one believes Russia wont attack again, said Vasyl Levko, the director of grain storage at MHP, one of Ukraines largest agricultural produce companies.

There is political will from Ukraines allies: The White House welcomed the accord, as did the United Nations and international aid organizations, which have warned of potential famine and political unrest the longer Ukraines grain remains blocked.

Freeing the grain for shipment is expected to ease a growing hunger crisis brought on by Russias aggression not so much because Ukrainian grain may be shipped to desperate countries faster, but because more supplies can help bring down prices, which spiked after the war but have been falling recently. Its quite positive, said Nikolay Gorbachov, head of the Ukrainian Grain Association. Its possible to find the way.

Yet even when reopened, the Black Sea ports are expected to operate at just about half of their prewar capacity, experts say, covering only a portion of the more than 20 million tons of backlogged grain. Ships will steer through a path cleared of Ukrainian mines used to prevent Russian ships from entering, and endure inspections in Turkey to ensure they dont carry weapons back into Ukraine.

And it is uncertain that enough ships will venture back. Shipping companies that once operated in the Black Sea have taken on other cargo routes. Insurers are wary of covering vessels in a conflict zone, and without insurance, no one will ship.

In the meantime, Ukraines farmers are grappling with vast amounts of trapped grain from last years harvests. Before the war, new crops moved in and out of grain elevators from harvest to export like clockwork. But Russias Black Sea blockage created a massive pileup.

An additional estimated 40 million tons of wheat, rapeseed, barley, soy, corn and sunflower seeds is expected to be harvested in the coming months. Storage facilities not destroyed by Russian shelling are filling up, and room is growing scarce for the freshly reaped crops.

At an MHP grain processing center one hour east of Lviv, a truck filled with freshly harvested rapeseed tiny, shiny and black dumped its load into a sifter on a recent day. The seed was moved into a dryer and then funneled into a towering silo that still had some room available. A nearby silo didnt: It was filled with soybeans stuck there from the previous harvest.

A bigger worry was what to do with the current winter-planted wheat harvest, said Mr. Levko, whose company uses the grain to make feed for chicken farms it owns in Ukraine, as well as grain for export. With his silos at the Lviv site near capacity, the wheat will have to be stuffed into long plastic sheaths for temporary storage.

The company was scrambling to buy more sheaths, he said, but Russian rockets destroyed the sole Ukrainian factory that makes them, and European manufacturers are swamped with orders and cant keep up, Mr. Levko said.

July 29, 2022, 12:56 a.m. ET

After the wheat comes the corn harvest. That will have to be piled onto the ground and covered with a tarp to protect it from thousands of crows and pigeons that hover nearby like black clouds, as well from as the autumn rains, which can create rot, Mr. Levko added.

The crops will have to be stored everywhere, he said, sweeping his arm over a vast field. He added that even if the deal to unblock the Black Sea worked, it could take months for Odesas shipping capacity to help ease the grain pileup.

In the meantime, farmers are trying to expand an alternative labyrinth of transport routes that they have forged across Europe since the outbreak of the war.

Before Russias blockade, Ukraine exported up to seven million tons of grain a month, mostly on ships that can carry large loads. Since then, Ukraine has been able to get out only around two million tons per month, via a hastily cobbled patchwork of overland and river routes.

Continental Farmers Group used to export harvests through the Black Sea, Mr. von Nolcken said. Deliveries by ship could arrive in the Middle East and North Africa in as little as six days.

But the blockade forced the company to put some of its grain on a circuitous path that involves making a giant counterclockwise circle around Europe on trucks, trains, barges and ships via Poland, the North Sea and the English Channel, through the Strait of Gibraltar and back down to the Mediterranean, an odyssey that can take up to 18 days.

With so many exporters competing to get grain out of Ukraine, the cost of transporting it has ballooned to about $130 to $230 a ton from about $35 before the war, with eastern regions near Russian-occupied zones facing the sharpest price hikes, Mr. von Nolcken added. At the same time, grain prices within Ukraine have plunged by around two-thirds because the blockade left farmers holding too much grain, threatening the livelihood of many.

European countries have been working furiously to solve one of the biggest challenges: transporting grain by rail. Previously, Ukraines 38,000 grain cars carried crops mostly to Black Sea ports, but they run on Soviet-era tracks that dont match Europes. So rail shipments heading elsewhere must now be transferred to other trains once they reach the border.

The biggest opportunity for scaling up exports is with trucks. Roman Slaston, the head of Ukraines main agricultural lobby, said his group was aiming to get out 40,000 tons of grain per day by truck. By June, trucks were getting out 10,000 tons per day.

But that still relieves only a part of Ukraines backlog. And with so much added traffic on the road, border crossings are jammed. It now takes four days instead of four hours, before the war for grain trucks to cross from Ukraine to Poland, said Mr. Levko of MFP. Getting over the Serbian border takes 10 days instead of two. The European Union is trying to ease backups with fast-track border permits.

The question is, how long is the situation going to continue? Mr. von Nolcken said. On Feb. 24, everybody assumed this would be a one-week exercise. Over 150 days later, we are talking about opening ports again, with reservations.

But a harsh reality is still facing Ukraine. Despite the war, it has been a hefty harvest so far this year.

We are building up a tsunami of grain, producing more than we can export, Mr. von Nolcken added. We will still be sitting on crops that wont get out.

Erika Solomon contributed reporting from Lviv, Ukraine.

Original post:
Crops Stored Everywhere: Ukraines Harvest Piles Up - The New York Times

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) Russias top diplomat said Moscows overarching goal in Ukraine is to free its people from its unacceptable regime, expressing the Kremlins war aims in some of the bluntest terms yet as its forces pummel the country with artillery barrages and airstrikes.

The remark from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov comes amid Ukraines efforts to resume grain exports from its Black Sea ports something that would help ease global food shortages under a new deal tested by a Russian strike on Odesa over the weekend.

We are determined to help the people of eastern Ukraine to liberate themselves from the burden of this absolutely unacceptable regime, Lavrov said at an Arab League summit in Cairo late Sunday, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyys government.

Apparently suggesting that Moscows war aims extend beyond Ukraines industrial Donbas region in the east, Lavrov said: We will certainly help the Ukrainian people to get rid of the regime, which is absolutely anti-people and anti-historical.

Lavrovs comments followed his warning last week that Russia plans to retain control over broader areas beyond eastern Ukraine, including the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in the south, and will make more gains elsewhere.

His remarks contrasted with the Kremlins line early in the war, when it repeatedly emphasized that Russia wasnt seeking to overthrow Zelenskyys government, even as Moscows troops closed in on Kyiv. Russia later retreated from around the capital and turned its attention to capturing the Donbas. The war is now in its sixth month.

Last week, Russia and Ukraine signed agreements aimed at clearing the way for the shipment of millions of tons of desperately needed Ukrainian grain, as well as the export of Russian grain and fertilizer.

Ukraines deputy infrastructure minister, Yury Vaskov, said the first shipment of grain is planned for this week.

While Russia faced accusations that the weekend attack on the port of Odesa amounted to reneging on the deal, Moscow insisted the strike would not affect grain deliveries.

During a visit to the Republic of Congo on Monday, Lavrov repeated the Russian claim that the attack targeted a Ukrainian naval vessel and a depot containing Western-supplied anti-ship missiles. He said the grain agreements do not prevent Russia from attacking military targets.

In other developments:

Russias gas giant Gazprom said it would further reduce the flow of natural gas through a major pipeline to Europe to 20% of capacity, citing equipment repairs. The move heightened fears that Russia is trying to pressure and divide Europe over its support for Ukraine at a time when countries are trying to build up their supplies of gas for the winter.

Zelenskyy accused Moscow of gas blackmail, saying, All this is done by Russia deliberately to make it as difficult as possible for Europeans to prepare for winter.

Ukraines presidential office said Monday at least two civilians were killed and 10 wounded in Russian shelling over the preceding 24 hours. In the Kharkiv region, workers searched for people believed trapped under the rubble after 12 rockets hit the town of Chuhuiv before dawn, damaging a cultural center, school and other infrastructure, authorities said.

Kharkiv Gov. Oleh Sinyehubov said: It looks like a deadly lottery when no one knows where the next strike will come.

Ukraine charged two former cabinet ministers with high treason over their role in extending Moscows lease on a navy base in Crimea in 2010. Prosecutors said Oleksandr Lavrynovych and Kostyantyn Hryshchenko conspired with then-President Viktor Yanukovych to rush a treaty through parliament granting Moscow a 25-year extension, leaving Crimea vulnerable to Russian aggression.

Russia said it thwarted an attempt by Ukrainian intelligence to bribe Russian military pilots to turn their planes over to Ukraine. In a video released by Russias main security agency, a man purported to be a Ukrainian intelligence officer offered a pilot $2 million to surrender his plane during a mission over Ukraine. The Russian claims couldnt be independently verified.

Read more:
Russia says it wants to end Ukraine's `unacceptable regime' - The Associated Press

Russian efforts to embed its occupation of southern Ukraine are being undermined by the populations growing refusal to accept employment at key facilities, including banks, hospitals and heavy industry, i can reveal.

As Kyiv stepped up its efforts to retake the key city of Kherson as part of a long-awaited counter-offensive, evidence is emerging of the Kremlins faltering attempts to normalise life in a region which it is seeking to formally annex as part of Russia.

Moscow last month announced it had opened its first branches of the state-owned Promsvyazbank in the Kherson and neighbouring Zaporizhzhia regions as part of a Russification process which includes requiring Ukrainians to switch from using Kyivs hryvnia currency to the Russian ruble.

But Ukrainian officials claimed on Thursday that the three bank branches are currently able to offer only a partial service after locals refused to accept jobs with the company.

The National Resistance Centre (NRC), which coordinates partisan activity in occupied territory, said the problems at the bank branches in Kherson were part of a wider problem which is forcing the puppet administration put in place by the Kremlin to abandon plans to accept only Russian qualifications and permits.

The NRC said: It should be noted that the shortage of workers in the occupied territories due to the reluctance of locals to cooperate forced the Russians to recognise Ukrainian qualification certificates and work [permits].

A charity operating in Crimea, the region annexed by Moscow in 2014, and southern Ukraine earlier this month said it had evidence of a massive boycott by doctors in the Kherson region.

Crimea SOS said medics were applying en masse for extended leave or simply resigning from their jobs to avoid cooperating with the Russian military while at the same time many pharmacies in Kherson were closed, creating a black market in medications brought in from Russia. Deny Savchenko, head of the charity, said: Doctors in Kherson are massively refusing to cooperate with the occupiers.

Similar issues also appear to be affecting heavy industry in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian media reported last month that attempts by Russia to reopen a major iron ore works in Zaporizhzhia floundered after employees refused to sign contracts offering work at 60 per cent of their previous wage.

In the devastated city of Mariupol, an adviser to its exiled Ukrainian mayor this week insisted staff at a major steel work were staging a silent rebellion. Writing on the Telegram social media site, Petro Andriushchenko said: At the Illich Steel and Iron Works, workers staged a silent rebellion, refusing to go into the [factory].

The boycotts have provoked a blame game between Moscow and Kyiv over the motivation behind the refusal to work. A Moscow-appointed official in Kherson has previously claimed that many Ukrainian personnel are staying away because of a threat from Kyiv of prosecutions for anyone found to be collaborating with the occupying forces.

Kirill Stremousov, who is deputy head of the Kremlin-backed administration in Kherson and is wanted for treason by Kyiv, claimed staff were living in fear of proceedings. The official on Thursday doubled down on promises to hold a referendum on secession from Ukraine, telling Russian media: I hope that in the near future already we will become a full-fledged territorial entity of the Russian Federation.

For its part, Ukraine has insisted that civil disobedience is motivated by disdain for the occupying forces. The NRC said: Non-violent resistance in the temporarily occupied territories is developing exponentially. People have mastered various methods of resistance, including silent refusal to work in seized enterprises.

Experts said that the intensity of subversive action against the Russians in southern Ukraine is in part dependent on the perceived likelihood of success for Kyiv in seizing back territory, in particular around Kherson City where Ukrainian forces succeeded on Thursday in destroying the citys sole road bridge across the Dnipro river. Kyiv said the strike using the American HIMARS missile system would hobble the Kremlins efforts to resupply its troops, though Moscow insisted it could instead use ferry routes and a railway bridge.

Professor Alexander Motyl, a Ukraine specialist at Rutgers University Newark, told i: Resistance will be high and collaboration low if the population expects Ukrainian armed forces to advance, as they currently do. Increased Russian repression will only increase resistance under such conditions.

Kherson is a key strategic asset for both sides in the war, with Russia holding it as a gateway for attacks towards the vital port of Odesa and Ukraine seeking its recapture as a route towards Crimea and the east of the country.

Kyiv has been quietly waging a partisan campaign in occupied southern cities such as Kherson and Melitopol, targeting Moscow-appointed officials. In the latest attack, Ukraine claimed this week that it had targeted two men recruited to work for the Russian-led police force in Kherson City, killing one and injuring another in an attack on a marked police car.

Read the original post:
Putin's occupation falters as Ukrainian workers boycott key jobs - iNews

When the invasion started, young Ukrainians were glued to their phones. The high volume of internet traffic, says 22-year-old Ukraine rapper Jockii Druce, led to his satirical song about Russias invasion becoming wildly popular.

Thousands of TikTok videos have been created in Ukraine using Jockii Druces music, racking up millions of plays.

His most viral song, entitled What Are You Brothers?, addresses Ukrainians but is an obvious play on the Russian president, Vladimir Putins, assertion that Ukraine and Russia are brotherly nations.

The song, released in early March, vents anger at Russia through its satirical lyrics, telling Ukrainians to let go of the idea that they can convince their brothers across the border to stop their invasion. Like an estimated one in four Ukrainians, Jockii Druce has relatives, albeit distant, in Russia.

The song ends by listing the historical and recent tragedies that Ukrainians have survived serfdom, genocide, revolutions, coronavirus and poses the rhetorical question of whether they should weep because of the full-scale invasion, followed by the final line: No way Russian warship go fuck yourself, which has become a rallying cry of Ukrainian resistance.

His music represents a trend of Ukrainians turning to Ukrainian culture as a way of connecting with one another and, ultimately, as a source of strength, say academics.

Young Ukrainians are the trailblazers in reflecting on Russias colonial legacy, they say, a topic little studied in the west or Russia in relation to the former Soviet and Tsarist empires. But the recent rejection of Russian culture in Ukraine has led Russian cultural figures to argue that Russian culture is being cancelled and its role misunderstood.

Jockii Druce is not the only Ukrainian artist to gain popularity after creating a song about the invasion. However, he is one of the few to do so with nuanced and stirring irony a talent that makes his music stand apart from the mainstream and has made him popular among younger Ukrainians.

Im not really an emotional person. [My work] is mostly about understanding different contexts and things people tend to manipulate, said Jockii Druce, at a cafe in downtown Kyiv, wearing a monochrome Adidas tracksuit.

When you realise what they think about us, that were some filthy fucking pigs that are just quick to riot and storm [buildings], and you just started to be ironic about it, he said, in a reference to the lyrics of another of his songs, Were Going to Have Breakfast.

For Jockii Druce, there is no point in trying to change Russians minds, because their state propaganda machine is too strong. You could send them a photo of dead children in Bucha or anything, he said of the site of an infamous Russian massacre. And theyre going to make 100 million fucking photos or get people to say that [Ukraine] did it.

Jockii Druce, who grew up in the south-central city of Dnipro, said he grew up as a Russian-speaking Ukrainian and started rapping with his friends after school for fun. He said he was not really interested in politics or geopolitics but after a while it became impossible not to be into it because people massively fucking died.

He switched to using Ukrainian several years before the war when he was tiring of rap, he said, and found rapping in Ukrainian allowed him to explore uncharted territories and renewed his enthusiasm for creating music.

I figured it out a long time ago that it kind of had a more organic and more authentic vibe to it when I do it in Ukrainian, said Jockii Druce. I quickly realised that no one could do it like I could do it. The Ukrainian language itself, and cultural context and all, gives a great fucking field of experience to experiment in, to observe and to work with, that nobody has done.

The Russian language is across the world, he said. There is a lot that has already been said and written in Russian and there is a lot to be said and written in Ukrainian.

On the question of Russian artists, Jockii Druce said he listens to more electronic music than rap, but he liked some Russian artists before the war and will not go back on that.

Would I support them? No. But to say that they are talentless or they are bad because of the war would just be hypocritical. This kind of logic feeds into the Russian narrative against Ukrainians that were Nazis or hateful, he said. Its not about pushing down others but standing on your own.

The role of Russian culture has been a hotly debated topic since February in Ukraine and in the west.

Figures in Ukraines music scene say they have stopped trying to communicate with Russian peers since the invasion.

[Our Russian counterparts] dont understand why we are so radical. They dont want to process what is happening and understand that they are an imperialistic country and they as cultural figures need to do something with that and reflect on that, said Maya Baklanova, who has been active in Ukrainian electronic music since 2014.

Baklanova put forward the example of Russians who have fled to Georgia and Armenia and held events without listening to the views of people in their host countries. They promote it as Armenia is the new Russian rave scene. They are trying to Russify the scene.

This week, Mikhail Shishkin, an exiled Russian poet living in Switzerland, penned an op-ed for The Atlantic in which he argued that Russian culture had been oppressed by successive Russian regimes and was being unfairly associated with Russias war crimes.

If Russian culture had been freer, wrote Shishkin, the invasion may not have happened.

The road to the Bucha massacre leads not through Russian literature, but through its suppression, Shishkin wrote, adding that he hoped Ukrainian poets would speak up for the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin, whose statues may be removed from town squares in Ukraine.

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Shishkins article has been criticised by some academics specialising in the region as tone deaf.

There is very little evidence that Russian culture has been relegated into oblivion, said Uilliam Blacker, an associate professor in comparative Russian and east European literature at University College Londons School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Russian culture has had hundreds of years of great prestige in the west.

Blacker said that in the current context, replacing a Russian composer in a concert programme with a Ukrainian one was a small gesture that would correct a very long and very deep imbalance in our perception of culture from that part of the world.

Ukrainians are distancing themselves from Russian writers not just because of a particular writers views but because they see the way it has been weaponised to colonise them, according to Vitaly Chernetsky, a professor of Slavic literature at the University of Kansas, in the US.

[Pushkin] was a talented poet but hes also somebody who had a very imperialist and condescending attitude towards Ukraine, said Chernetsky. This was something omitted in the past. [Ukrainians] always had certain aspects of [Russian] writers highlighted and others obscured.

The war has prompted a lot of reflection, he added. The younger people are much further ahead than the older generation.

Originally posted here:
Standing on your own: Ukrainian rapper on connecting with his countrys culture - The Guardian

Overview

The military offensive by the Russian Federation in Ukraine which began February 2022 has triggered one of the worlds fastest-growing displacement and humanitarian crisis, with geopolitical and economic ripples felt across the globe. The ongoing war has caused large-scale disruptions to the delivery of health services and a near-collapse of the health system. But the crisis also saw an extraordinary mobilization and crisis response to a health emergency by WHO and its more than 100 partners.

The just published interim reportdemonstrates what has been achieved in just over three months; how WHO, the health authorities in Ukraine and international and national partners have reached and assisted millions of people and prevented Ukraines health system from disintegrating and ceasing to function.

By delivering specialized medical supplies, coordinating the deployment of emergency medical teams, verifying and reporting attacks on healthcare and working with health authorities, WHO and health partners have minimized disruptions to the delivery of critical healthcare services within Ukraine and in countries hosting refugees.

This life saving work would not be possible without your valuable and continued support.

See more here:
WHO's Response to the Ukraine Crisis - World Health Organization