“it isn’t a time of plenty in the breadbasket of Europe, and not only because Russia, for now, says it won’t continue the arrangement it made with the United Nations and Turkey that for a year permitted 32 million tons of Ukrainian grain to be exported from the country’s massive southern ports. The present war has stunted Ukraine’s grain industry at every stage, beginning months before harvest time.
Though blessed with an abundance of wheat-friendly chernozem — the Russian term for “black earth” — most Ukrainians fertilize their soil. “There’s a great shortage of nitrogen fertilizers,” says Denis Tkachenko, who helps run a trade association of Odesa region farms including about 12,000 acres. Fertilization means more grain enriched with the proteins enabling wheat to be baked into bread; poorer crops can be sold more cheaply for animal feed.”
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“there are many fewer fields. More than a quarter of Ukraine’s grain country lies east of the Dnieper River, and has been controlled or threatened by Russia since the February 2022 invasion. Even in the relatively safe southwest, the Ukrainian military has commandeered — thereby disabling — a lot of farmland. Tkachenko says that about 3 to 5 percent of the fields in his region were fortified early in the war against a possible Russian sea invasion. Another farmer in the area tells me that a third of his nearly 10,000 acres have been used for trenches, mining and the like.”
“Cluster munitions — or dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICMs), as they’re officially known — are haphazard and notoriously faulty. Once fired, they release dozens of bomblets in the air that spread out and saturate football-field- or city-block-size areas. The direction or targets for those bomblets can’t be controlled, and they don’t always immediately explode, turning into de facto land mines. For those reasons, they are particularly dangerous to civilians during war, but also long after a conflict ends.”
“”China will impose export restrictions on industrial products and materials containing gallium and germanium from August 1 to ensure its national security and interests,” China Daily, a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, announced this week. “According to the relevant provisions of China’s Export Control Law, Foreign Trade Law and Customs Law, gallium, which is used in the production of semiconductors and optoelectronic devices, and germanium, an important raw material for the semiconductor industry, as well as their related products, cannot be exported without permission after July. Export of other industrial materials such as gallium nitride, gallium oxide and zone-refined germanium ingot have also been prohibited.”
That’s a big deal because, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, “in 2021 the top exporters of Gallium, germanium, hafnium, indium, niobium (columbium), rhenium and vanadium: articles thereof, unwrought, including waste and scrap, powders were China ($170M), Chinese Taipei ($53.2M), Germany ($52.4M), Brazil ($43.1M), and South Korea ($32.4M).” China alone is responsible for 29.4 percent of the total (the U.S. is also an exporter, with a 5.47 percent share.)
Specifically breaking out the two restricted minerals, Reuters adds that China produces roughly 60 percent of the world’s germanium and 80 percent of gallium. So, there’s a lot at stake here for computer chip producers and for governments trying to promote domestic producers at the expense of Chinese competitors.”
“Russia has imported more than $100 million-worth of drones from China so far this year — 30 times more than Ukraine. And Chinese exports of ceramics, a component used in body armor, increased by 69 percent to Russia to more than $225 million, while dropping by 61 percent to Ukraine to a mere $5 million, Chinese and Ukrainian customs data show.
“What is very clear is that China, for all its claims that it is a neutral actor, is in fact supporting Russia’s positions in this war,” said Helena Legarda, a lead analyst specializing in Chinese defense and foreign policy at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a Berlin think tank.
Were China to cross the red line and sell weapons or military equipment to Russia, Legarda said she would expect the EU to enforce secondary sanctions targeting enablers of Putin’s war of aggression.”