The West cannot allow Russia to keep blackmailing the world

Let there be no doubt who is responsible for the shortages of grain and cooking oil that have helped fuel global inflation in recent months and, more to the point, sent the hungry in poorer nations to the brink of starvation.

The blame lies solely and firmly with Vladimir Putin and his illegal and cruel war against Ukraine. It is Russia that has disrupted the harvest; it is Russia that has stolen Ukrainian grain for its own purposes; and it is Russia that has mined the port of Odesa and restricted normal maritime traffic. President Putin has acted alone in his decision to weaponise goods and supplies.

That is the context within which the world may breathe a sigh of relief as the new deal to release grain exports from the region has been agreed. It has been brokered with Russia by Turkey, the regional power controlling access to the Black Sea, and agreed with Ukraine and the United Nations. Some 20 million tonnes of grain, plus other foodstuffs, will now be released before they rot.

So the crisis is abated, but only for the time being. Large swathes of north Africa and the Middle East will continue to be reliant on Russia’s permission in order to be fed adequately. If Russia judges, as it may have done in this case, that its diplomatic aims are badly served by a famine in Somalia and food riots in Sri Lanka, for example, then it will relent and release exports. If, on the other hand, it wants to push African and Asian nations to press the UN and the West to relax their sanctions on Russia, or to abandon Ukraine, then Mr Putin will be perfectly content to tolerate the loss of life that will follow. He has also been willing to spread propaganda claiming that it is the fault of the Ukrainians.

This is not a sustainable or tolerable situation. Sooner or later, the West will once again be faced with Russian blackmail, threatening to cut off the world’s food supply in the same way that it threatens Europe with cutting off its gas supply.

There has to be a “coalition of the willing” of naval powers prepared to guarantee the safe passage of foodstuffs through the Black Sea and the Bosphorus. Under the letter and the spirit of the Montreux Convention, which dates back to the 1930s and regulates access to the Black Sea, civilian cargo vessels should be free to move as they wish with the protection of navies drawn from around the world, in a purely defensive and proportionate fashion.

If countries are willing to make a show of power in an effort to deter Russian naval aggression, future grain and cooking oil export deals should be much easier to achieve. Odesa and the other southern Ukrainian ports, once liberated, must be free and open to the world once again.

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The key to gaining Russian acquiescence is to change the “facts on the ground” and support Ukraine as it tries to resist and push back the Russian military. There are some signs that the West’s technological expertise is giving Ukrainians an edge on the battlefield.

The Kremlin doesn’t seem to understand that the West cannot afford to lose this war – to allow Ukraine to be the first of many casualties of Russia’s creeping territorial expansion. As in the Cold War, the West cannot just shrug and accept living under the threat of Russian occupation or nuclear annihilation. Mr Putin, who is very much a product of that era and indeed of the Soviet Union, doesn’t seem willing to understand that, and fondly imagines that the Russian empire in eastern Europe can be restored.

President Putin is a typical opportunist autocrat with imperial ambitions, and – true to type – he only understands power. It was a mistake on the part of the West not to react more decisively when he annexed and occupied Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Nothing matters more for those in Europe than peace in Europe, and that means supporting Ukraine, at sea, in the air and on the ground.