Zelensky: Ukraine Delivers 500 Tons of Flour to Syria by Sea

A ship loaded with 500 tons of Ukrainian flour to help Syrian families is en route to Syria, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Monday statement.

The humanitarian aid donation, packed in 15-kilogram bags, will feed 33,250 families, or 167,000 people, and should arrive in Syria by ship in the coming weeks, he said on social platform X, formerly Twitter.

Zelensky said the aid is part of Kyiv’s “Grain From Ukraine” humanitarian program in cooperation with the UN World Food Programme (WFP). 

“We wish Syria and its people security, stability and recovery. We know the true value of these things,” Zelensky added. The social media statement was duplicated in Arabic and Ukrainian. 

According to a US Department of Agriculture estimate, Syria will need about 1.6 million tons of wheat imports this season. Due to the recent fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime and economic displacement, the Middle Eastern nation is likely to face food shortages unless other states offer assistance.

Russia has attacked Ukrainian grain ships in the past as part of a long-running campaign to choke off the Ukrainian economy and to force Ukrainian surrender.

Ukrainian naval and air forces by late 2023 largely nullified the Russian threat to Ukrainian sea exports by sinking slightly more than one in three warships in Russia’s Black Sea fleet and forcing the remaining vessels to retreat from the occupied port Sevastopol in Crimea to the Russian mainland.

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Russia’s current main Black Sea naval base, the port Novorossisk, is on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, safely out of the range of most Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and drones but also hundreds of kilometers from the main artery of maritime cargo shipments between Ukraine and other countries.

Currently, Ukrainian cargo ships transit the western Black Sea along a corridor moving through territorial waters controlled by the NATO states Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Russian attack attempts against both Ukrainian and neutral-flagged ships traveling in the corridor have been rare.