The adviser to the head of the OPU said that Moscow is directly blackmailing Western countries.
The Russian Federation is trying to lift Western sanctions through blackmail. This time Moscow is using food crisis and refugees.
Oleksiy Arestovich, adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, spoke about this during a conversation with Russian human rights activists Mark Feigin.
“The two fingers they put in the barrel of the West. The first is the refugees associated with the food crisis, refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, who are largely dependent on food from Ukraine. The food map, behind which looms the continuation of 2015 in Europe, millions of refugees, escalating the situation to such an extent that France, Italy and Germany will turn their heads and begin to solve the refugee crisis. Russia directly threatens them,” the message says.
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According to him, the main goal of Russian blackmail is to lift Western sanctions.
“And secondly, they understood the threat. They suggested the following: you lift sanctions from us, and we open the ports of Ukraine for the export of grain and other agricultural products, otherwise, you know, there will be a food crisis,” Arestovich summed up.
As UNIAN previously reported, Ukraine cannot export agricultural products due to the fact that Russian warships in the Black Sea block the passage of merchant ships. In particular, Ukraine managed to export 1 million 90 thousand tons of grain in April, while in March this figure was only about 200 thousand tons. Before the war, farmers exported about 5 million tons per month.
In turn, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko linked the issue of opening by the Russian side of access to ports in Ukraine with the possibility of lifting sanctions on Russian exports imposed by the West.
At the same time, the UN stated that if the Odessa port is not unblocked, this exacerbate the food crisis.
At the same time, the President of Senegal and the President of the African Union, Maki Sall will seek from Russia and Ukraine unlocking grain export in order to avoid widespread famine. To do this, Sall is going to visit Russia and Ukraine in the near future. BUT US says it won’t lift sanctions in exchange for access to Ukrainian ports.
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