Export of wheat from occupied Crimea to Syria increased 17 times to 500 000 tons. This is almost a third of the total import of grain into the country.
Reuters writes about this with reference to data from the trade and information platform Refinitiv.
Sanctions make it difficult to transport goods between Syria and Russia by conventional sea transport and marine insurance, so those countries increasingly rely on their own ships to transport grain, including three Syrian vessels that are under the U.S. sanctions.
According to Refinitiv data, until the end of November 2022, Syria imported about 501.8 thousand tons of wheat from Sevastopol. For the whole of 2021, it received approximately 28.2 thousand tons from there.
According to data from port inspection reports, shipments increased from May onwards, with the largest batch being 78,600 tonnes in October.
The Embassy of Ukraine in Beirut, which monitors cargoes arriving in Syria, believes that these 500 000 tons of Ukrainian grain were stolen by the Russian invaders. The embassy said that these calculations and claims of the Ukrainian authorities about the theft of grain were based on information from the owners of fields and silos in the occupied territories, satellite information about the movement of trucks to ports and ship tracking data.
- The Bloomberg edition, with reference to NASA Harvest, wrote that Russia exported at least a billion dollars worth of grain from Ukraine. And the Financial Times published an investigation in which, using the example of one vessel, it showed how Russia trades in stolen Ukrainian grain from the Zaporizhzhia region.