The war in Ukraine is a tragedy that must be stopped, otherwise there will be a global food crisis, while fertilizer prices around the world already too high for many farmers, Russian coal and fertilizer king Andrei Melnichenko said on Monday.
Many of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen, including Mikhail Fridman, Pyotr Aven and Oleg Deripaska, have publicly called for peace since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion on February 24.
The United States and its European allies have thrown Putin in the towel invasion as an imperial-style land grab that has so far been poorly executed because Moscow has underestimated Ukrainian resistance and the West. resolve punish Russia.
The West has sanctioned Russian businessmen, including European Union sanctions on Melnichenko, frozen state assets and cut off many of the Russian business sector of the global economy in an attempt to force Putin to change course.
Putin refuses.
“The events in Ukraine is truly tragic. us urgently need peace”, Melnichenko, 50, who is Russian but was born in Belarus and has a Ukrainian mother, told Reuters in a statement emailed by son spokesperson.
“As a Russian by nationality, a Belarusian by birth and a Ukrainian by blood, I feel great pain and disbelief brotherly testimony peoples fights and dying.”
Russia invasion of Ukraine has killed thousands of displaced more more than 2 millions people and raised fears of a wider confrontation between Russia and the United States, the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
Putin says Russians and Ukrainians are basically one people and that a “special military operation” was necessary because the United States was using Ukraine menace Russia, while Russian speakers are persecuted in Ukraine.
“A of the victims of this crisis will be agriculture and food,” says Melnichenko, who founded Uralchem, the most grand Russian producer of ammonium nitrate, based in Zug, Switzerland, and SUEK, Russia’s largest coal producer.
“He has already drive up prices in fertilizers that are no longer affordable to farmers. »
Melnichenko said a supply chain already disrupted by COVID-19 was now even more distressed. “Now it’s OK lead same higher food inflation in Europe and likely food shortages in the world is the poorest countries,” he said.
