WORTHLESS DEAL

Russia Strikes Ukrainian Port Less than One Day After UN Export Deal

Ukraine’s foreign ministry said the attack “spit in the face” of the UN secretary general and Turkish president, who “expended enormous effort to reach this agreement.”

Less than 24 hours after the United Nations and Turkey helped broker an export deal between Ukraine and Russia, explosions have reportedly ravaged Ukrainian port city Odesa. It’s unclear, the New York Times reports, whether the Russian strikes technically violated the deal—brokered to secure the transport of grain to impoverished nations currently weathering a food crisis. (Russian president Vladimir Putin is about to begin a tour of Africa, where the Times reports he’s expected to try and shift blame for food shortages to the West.) Still, Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman, Oleg Nikolenko, wasted no time in condemning the Kremlin; the Times reports Nikolenko wrote on Facebook that with these attacks, Putin had “spit in the face” of the UN secretary general and the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—who’ve “expended enormous effort” to make the agreement happen. It’s unclear at present whether the attacks hit any grain infrastructure. But as Ukraine’s agriculture minister, Mykola Solskyi, told the Times, “If you attack a port, you attack everything. You use a lot of the same infrastructure for oil, for grain. It has an impact on everything—it doesn’t matter what you hit.”