In blocking grain shipments from leaving Ukraine, Putin has gone from starving cities to starving the world. He has also gone from holding the world hostage with threats of nuclear war, in order to continue with his invasion of Ukraine, to holding hundreds of millions of hungry children hostage, in order to end international sanctions on his country.
It is an extraordinary escalation and quite possibly a first in modern warfare.
The Economist reports that nearly 250 million people worldwide are now living on the brink of famine, while those who cannot get enough to eat has grown by 440 million to 1.6 billion so far this year.
In this way, Russia’s attack on Ukraine has increased international levels of malnutrition to rates not seen in generations. Hunger is not simply a by-product of the war, though. In blocking grain from leaving Ukraine, Putin is using it as a weapon with which to threaten the world.
So now, the genocidal tactics that Russian troops have employed to lay siege to and starve the inhabitants of cities like Aleppo in Syria and Ukraine’s Mariupol have been globalized.
The victims of this crime will not be killed directly, but that’s usually the case when hunger is used as a weapon of war. Rather, international organizations will be predicting the deaths of starving people months and sometimes years in advance. In this way, Putin is knowingly preparing to kill millions of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world, for they will soon be unable to afford to eat, as the price of grain rises and their calorie intake falls.
The Russian leader has effectively taken hundreds of millions of malnourished people hostage by insisting that he will only let grain shipments out if the sanctions on his country are ended. Pakistanis and Ugandans, Indians and Nigerians, Gazans and Ghanaians, will all have Putin to thank for murdering their children. They will have Putin to thank for their stunted growth, wasting figures, the hunger and disease, because it is Putin who has put the gun to their children’s heads and threatened to fire if he does not get what he wants.
It is children who tend to be hurt most by famine, and Putin has broadened his attack on the young from the raping of teenage girls in Ukraine to a global war on the world’s poorest kids.
What Putin wants is to be able to rape and loot at will, to be able to take Ukraine’s wheat and coal and natural gas without providing anything in return. He wants to steal its resources, kill its people, wipe their country off the map and put an end to their language and identity, with impunity, because no one can make him suffer any consequences without causing a global catastrophe—and that’s genocidal.
Putin is taking aim at hospitals and schools, train stations and shelters, in order to inflict maximum civilian casualties, with the ultimate aim of erasing the Ukrainian identity. And that is genocide, whatever the academic experts have to say from the other side of the world, before they have dug up the mass graves, tallied the deaths, interviewed the rape victims, written their reports, and slowly faced up to what their hearts could not handle.
“The history of genocides is at once a history of their denial,” writes the Syrian dissident intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
Humanity denies genocide because it usually takes place in forgotten corners of the globe, where journalists fear to tread, and the act is carefully covered up. Yet, we also deny genocide because it is just too horrific to face, and it is too unimaginable to comprehend. Russia is right now committing genocide in Ukraine, and the Russians have taken the world’s poorest and most vulnerable children hostage so that they can continue unimpeded.
It is not the first time Putin has taken the whole world hostage in this war. Every time that he has threatened to initiate a nuclear war that could end in a nuclear winter he was taking every single person on the planet hostage. For he was telling humanity, “Let me blow up Ukraine, or I will blow up the world.” In this way, Putin was threatening the world with genocide, but instead of committing genocide on humanity, which would have risked his own life as well, he is unleashing it on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable children.
And this probably has something to do with the fact that poor children have no voice, no access to the levers of power.
Hunger has increasingly come to be used as a weapon of war. In just the past decade, Israel has used it against Gaza, Saudi Arabia against Yemen, Ethiopia against the Tigrayans, and Assad against his own people, with the help of Russia and Iran. But holding hundreds of millions of starving children hostage is new, and it is a good reminder of why Putin has come to be viewed as the twenty-first century’s Hitler.
It is not simply the severity of his crimes against humanity that have won him the moniker. Rather, it is his willingness to tear down the world in order to get what he wants.
However, identifying the madness will not bring it to an end.
It is now incumbent on those who can see the implications to sound the alarms and insist that he be stopped.
And stopping Putin from starving the world means breaking the blockade and allowing the grain shipments to leave Ukraine’s ports.
What is required is an international flotilla, with each of the world’s poorest states represented, along with the military might of the most powerful nations, and representatives of as many states as can be found in between, to escort the grain shipments out.
Breaking the blockade will save Ukraine’s economy, but given the stakes, that’s incidental to the greater goal of saving hundreds of millions of people from starvation. Still, it is a vital reminder of Ukraine’s centrality to the world and of the importance of its freedom. A dictator willing to use Ukraine to starve so many millions of people cannot be entrusted with its vast agricultural resources—or the lives of a single human being.
Theo Horesh is author of four books on global affairs, including The Holocausts We All Deny. His writings can be found at theohoresh.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and not necessarily those of the Kyiv Post.
