Russia began seizing Ukrainian farms less than a week after the invasion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin could face a new charge of war crimes, as there is evidence that the Russian Federation planned to lead to a deliberate famine in Ukraine and prepared for this in advance.
The Independent writes about this.
Russia was actively preparing to steal Ukrainian grain supplies and starve Ukrainians months before Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, according to new evidence compiled by human rights experts.
When Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, they deliberately targeted grain-rich areas and food production infrastructure, according to a new report from global human rights law firm Global Rights Compliance (GRC).
GRC discovered that the Russian defense contractor began purchasing grain trucks, as well as three new 170-meter bulk carriers, as early as December 2021. This, according to the GRC, indicates a plan to steal Ukrainian food “on an unprecedented scale.”
Capture of Ukrainian farms
Russia began seizing Ukrainian farms less than a week after the invasion and at its peak was exporting 12,000 tons of grain daily from all occupied territories.
The GRC's goal is to provide the ISS with evidence that the Russians wanted to use starvation as a tool of war. This will allow the first ever prosecution of its kind to begin.
“It is very likely that Russia will be found guilty,” says Catriona Murdoch, a partner at Global Rights Compliance, and then the International Criminal Court in The Hague will be able to issue another arrest warrant for Putin – in addition to the one the ISS already issued in March this year for the indictment. in the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to the Russian Federation.
“Russia not only took a multilateral approach, besieging civilians and destroying critical infrastructure, but also pre-planned the seizure and theft of Ukrainian agricultural products,” Murdoch told The Independent.
“Moscow provoked a global food crisis and attacked Ukraine’s agricultural sector as a tool of war,” she adds.
The market value of grain stolen in Ukraine is about $1 billion a year. According to GRC, many private Ukrainian grain companies were forcibly included in the Russian state operator.
According to The Independent, due to the war that broke out in Ukraine, Russia caused a global food crisis that affected millions of people, since before the war Ukraine was the world's largest producer of wheat.
A farmer from Zaporozhye said that his grain enterprise was captured by Russian troops five days after the start of a full-scale invasion.
“Over the following weeks, several convoys were spotted transporting grain towards the Crimean peninsula, and GPS trackers on hijacked farm trucks show them traveling through Crimea to Russia,” GRC said.
Satellite images provided to The Independent by GRC experts show grain trucks with license plates registered in occupied Crimea parked in Melitopol. In other images, carriages with the inscription “Grain” depart from the station in Berdyansk.
And a photo taken in March of this year shows a newly built warehouse building in Melitopol, filled with grain.
The GRC suggests that despite having a plan, the Russians were unable to quickly find truck drivers to transport the huge amount of stolen Ukrainian food.
The investigation lasted until August of this year. The GRC said that while Russia has not seized any grain-rich territory since then, it still controls the entire Crimean peninsula, one of the main regions from which grain is transported by sea to Russia and abroad.
Global Rights Compliance senior lawyer Yusuf Syed Khan called Russia's use of grain as a weapon “unprecedented in modern history.”
Russia is now asking the UN and other states to ease war-related sanctions so it can resume grain exports from occupied territory to countries hit hardest by the food crisis. The grain offer to friendly third countries was also part of Putin's failed attempt to return to the UN Human Rights Council, the newspaper writes.
“Russia is doing this in order to present itself as the rightful owner of Ukrainian territories, which in turn also weakens the national economy of Ukraine,” Khan said.
Authorization to arrest Putin
The International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
The International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, said Russian President Vladimir Putin will face justice in The Hague for crimes committed against Ukraine, regardless of Moscow's arguments .
President Vladimir Zelensky said that Ukraine cannot compromise with Russia , because it is Vladimir Putin who is guilty of serious war crimes on the territory of our state.
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has opened a “criminal case” against the prosecutor and judges of the International Criminal Court in The Hague , who previously issued an arrest warrant for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
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