The local government in Russia’s third-largest Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk passed a resolution on April 27 to expropriate grain from the occupied parts of Ukraine’s southern region of Kherson.
The news release by the Krasnoyarsk Krai (territory) government, says the decision was made partly because there “is only one cucumber production plant in the region.”
The adverse effects of “foreign sanctions” on Russia due to its ongoing, unprovoked war against Ukraine was also cited as a reason for seizing grain in the occupied parts of Ukraine.
“The expropriation of last year’s and this year’s crop surpluses from farmers in the Kherson region will become one of the tools to assist small businesses and consumer cooperatives,” the Russian federal subject’s government statement said.
Kherson, a port city in southern Ukraine bordering the occupied peninsula of Crimea, is the only major city to be fully taken over by invading Russian forces. Local residents resist the occupying forces by staging rallies at the risk of force being used against them, arrest and torture.
More than 200 people in the city of about 300,000 people have disappeared at the hands of invading Russian authorities, Kherson Mayor Ihor Kolykhayev told Current Time, a joint project by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
The grain seizures are reminiscent of the forced famine of Ukrainians in 1932-1933 when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin implemented policies through his henchmen to seize crops and foodstuffs from Ukraine’s countryside.
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The policies are considered genocide in Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine, a book authored by Anne Applebaum that chronicles what Ukrainians call, “Holodomor,” or death by famine. The author said her research found that about 4 million people died were deliberately starved to death in the span of two years.
Officials in Kyiv and elsewhere have warned of oncoming global food shortages due to the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine, already in its ninth year, which intensified when Kremlin despot Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of the neighboring country on Feb. 24.
Ukraine is a global agricultural powerhouse and is the world’s top-10 producer of sunflower oil, wheat, corn and other grains.
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