CHERNIHIV REGION, Ukraine — A few kilometers from the Russian front line just outside the town of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine, Oleg Simonenko isn’t sure how he’ll get through the coming weeks.
The 55-year-old and his son converted their 400-hectare (988.4-acre) grain farm into a base for the Territorial Defense Forces — civilians turned fighters. The pair man checkpoints by day and farm by evening. He was fortunate to sell his wheat before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion and plant again this year, but he worries he’ll have nowhere to store the grain if his country’s ports remain blocked.
He also worries that Russian forces could target his fields and burn the crops once they are ready for harvest as they’ve already blown the roof off of several communal storage buildings near his farm.
“Right now they're targeting more the railways and the places where military vehicles and people are gathered,” he said. But he is also worried that Russian forces will target fields more as the grains grow.
The war in Ukraine has created an unprecedented global food crisis with farmers unable to cultivate or move their grains out of the country and hunger also growing inside the country. Before the invasion, Ukraine was the world’s fifth-largest wheat exporter, feeding some 400 million people, according to the United Nations. But Russia has blockaded the country’s ports on the Black Sea — the main export routes — and the area is also heavily mined.
Keep reading: Join Devex on the ground as we visit Ukraine to document how Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea is affecting farmers in the country.
About the author
Sam Mednick
Sam Mednick is a Devex Contributing Reporter based in Burkina Faso. Over the past 15 years she has reported on conflict, post-conflict, and development stories from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. She recently spent almost three years reporting on the conflict in South Sudan as the Associated Press correspondent. Her work has also appeared in The New Humanitarian, VICE, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera, among others.