Besieged farmers have warned of a harvest from “hell” as Vladimir Putin’s troops try to choke off the Ukrainian economy and bring Kyiv’s war effort to its knees.
Tonnes of grain and other crops have been wiped out due to the fighting and farmers see the Kremlin’s shelling of the Nika-Tera port facility in the southern city of Mykolaiv on 4 June as just the most dramatic example of a wider assault on a pillar of Ukraine’s economy - and the world’s.
“Agriculture is one of the few business sectors that is working... Of course they want to destroy it,” Volodymyr Onyschuk, a farmer, said near a pile of Russian shell casings on his 2,000 hectare wheat and sunflower holding near Mykolaiv.
“They want to end this stream of income into the country,” he added, warning of a harvest from “hell” in the coming weeks.
Elsewhere, Volodmyr Zelensky said that the battle for Donbas, Ukraine’s eastern-most region bordering Russia, will go down in history as one of the “most brutal battles” in Europe’s history.
