Hellraiser wrote: Sat Jul 08, 2023 5:41 pm
The Russians bragging that the were going to pull out of the grain deal. Erdogan and Zelensky took them at their word.
The Russians are cunts and targeting Ukrainian civilians. They've gone after Ukraine's power infrastructure, but that means confined locations and Ukraine have beefed up air defence for those locations. Russia tried to send Ukrainians through winter in the cold to break them and failed. The next logical move is to try and destroy their agri industry, which is more distributed and therefore harder for Ukraine to defend. That means binning the grain export deal and bombing all grain infrastructure.
Much like their dumb idea that exporting primary resources like gas and oil makes them masters of Europe (it does not, it can be bought elsewhere etc). They're going to discover something else about markets, there's buyers as well as sellers. A lot of the African peace delegation's 10 points were about the agri sector. Most African countries don't import much wheat and don't have it as a staple (SA's staple is maize), but less wheat will raise prices generally, and there's also the fertilizer issue. Then there's the African countries which do rely on wheat (Arab countries in the north), like Egypt which was part of the African peace delegation. Egypt imports massive amounts of grain from Ukraine and Russia, when the price of bread goes up in Egypt their security services start worrying about a revolution. Which is probably why Egypt agreed to be a subordinate in an SA headed peace delegation doomed to failure, they're fucking desperate.
The thing about Egypt is they also have a massive military they're never going to use because they're never going to fight Israel and Israel is never going to fight them (well if it's happening it won't be any time soon). So if Putin goes through with this, Egypt will have a higher bread price, but will have mountains of military equipment to bargain with. Egypt will have also told Putin not to do this. Egypt has well over a thousand Abrams as just one example, way more gear than most European countries. Algeria has 500+ T-90s.
"Stop Ukraine exporting grain" doesn't work out so well, when north Africans depend on it, they're heavily armed, with the only possibility of them accessing grain again cheaply is Ukraine winning.