The Race to Free Ukraine's Stranded Grain - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Baltic Sea port has silos to store plenty of grain, railway lines to transport it there from Ukraine, where it has been trapped by the war, and a deep harbor ready for ships that can take it to Egypt, Yemen and other countries in desperate need of food.
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Belarus controls the railway lines offering the most direct, cheapest and fastest route for large volumes of grain out of Ukraine to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports.
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But using them would mean cutting a deal with a brutal leader closely allied with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, underscoring the painful moral and political decisions that now confront Western leaders as they scramble to avert a global food crisis.
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The Lithuania route appears to be the most promising for getting food quickly to areas like the Middle East and Africa that need it the most, even if it is also a long shot.
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“This is a decision that politicians need to take not me,” Mr. Latakas, the Klaipeda port director, said. “It is up to them to decide what is most important.”
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Western nations like the United States, as well as Ukraine, oppose lifting sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion but have not ruled out a deal with Belarus.
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The war has halted those shipments, leaving around 25 million tons of grain, according to U.N. estimates, from last year’s harvest stranded in silos and at risk of rotting if it is not moved soon. A further 50 million tons is expected to be harvested in coming months. The grain elevators in Ukraine that have not been damaged or destroyed by shelling are quickly filling up. Soon, there will be no room left to store the incoming harvest.
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Ukraine’s foreign minister, said severe bottlenecks meant that the existing routes through Poland and Romania “can provide only limited alleviation of the food crisis” given the volumes that need to be moved.
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Warning of an approaching “hurricane of hunger,” the head of the United Nations, António Guterres, has sought to negotiate a deal under which Ukrainian grain would be transported out of the country by ship or train, and in exchange Russia and Belarus would sell fertilizer products to the global market without the threat of sanctions.
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That means that Western governments and Ukraine are left to try out a range of possible solutions fraught with problems. Test runs of trains carrying grain from Ukraine through Poland to Lithuania, for example, have taken three weeks because of different track gauges in neighboring countries, requiring cargos to be loaded and unloaded multiples times.
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Turkey has proposed using its ships to transport grain from Odesa, which, in addition to getting Ukraine to demine the port, would require an agreement from Russia not to hinder vessels.
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But faced with the considerable challenges of executing such a plan, the best option for getting large quantities of Ukrainian grain to hungry people is probably by rail through Belarus to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports in Latvia and Estonia.That “won’t solve everything, but it would significantly alleviate the situation,”
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Ukraine is opposed to any easing of sanctions against Russia but, increasingly desperate to move grain trapped by the war, is more open to the idea of a temporary easing of sanctions against Belarusian potash.
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Roman Slaston, the head of Ukraine’s main agricultural lobby, said one challenge was that many rail connections through Belarus had been blown up by Belarusian railway employees sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause.
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“Given that the Russian Army is still in Belarus, who is going to pay to repair that now?” Mr. Slaston asked. “This is like some kind of madness.”
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We don’t grow food to store it,” he said. “People in Africa won’t be fed by our grain sitting in bags in our fields.”