The strikes on the port city of Odessa have smashed the UN-brokered deal aimed at easing global food shortages
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rightly called the strikes on the port city of Odessa on Saturday an act of barbarism. The missile strikes smashed the UN-brokered deal that was intended to ease global food shortages by recommencing grain exports from the Black Sea region. Typically, the Kremlin has indulged in prevarication, claiming that the target was military infrastructure. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres looks further diminished. As it is, the world body has lost its raison d’etre. When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the unwanted, brutal needless war against the hapless Ukrainians, Guterres made a fervent but feeble appeal to Putin, “President Putin, in the name of humanity, bring your troops back to Russia”. Just like the cornered Hindi film heroine begs a rapacious Prem Chopra or Ranjeet, “Bhagwan ke liye mujhe chhod do!” And now this. After Russia, Ukraine, and intermediary Turkey signed the deal, the UN Secretary General had said the deal offered a “beacon of hope”. The hope has been dashed—withing 24 hours of the signing of the deal. As a CNN report said, “Sadly for Guterres and all those counting on the much-needed food, his months of diplomatic slog—including visits to Moscow and Kyiv to nail the deal—ultimately illuminated the limitations of trusting Russia.” For Putin’s Russia has increasingly been behaving like a rogue state, indulging in chicanery, acting on it, and threatening and attacking neighbours.
On few moral and rational grounds Putin’s
belligerence can be justified. He accused Ukraine of genocide, but provided no evidence of mass murders. He said that he wanted to shield people from bullying; he claimed that he stood for the “demilitarisation and de-Nazification” of Ukraine. But Zelenskyy is a Jew. “How could I be a Nazi?” he asked incredulously. And it’s not that anti-Semitism is rampant in Ukraine, and Zelenskyy is just a token President, signifying nothing. The very fact that the Ukrainians elected a Jew as their President underlines the almost complete absence of anti-Semitism in the Eastern European nation. There is no country in the world, other than Israel, whose head of the state is a Jew; in fact, it is hard to find any such nation which ever had a Jewish head of the state or government. Yet, intoxicated with power and irredentism, Putin started the war—and is showing no intent of ending it. Reacting to the Odessa strikes, Ukrainian Member of Parliament Oleksiy Goncharenko said that Russia is “showing they want to continue to threaten the world's food security.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s reaction also expressed dismay, “The attack cast serious doubt on the credibility of Russia's commitment.” UK Foreign Minister Liz Truss, who is among the top two contenders for the post of the prime minister, said, “It shows not a word [Putin] says can be trusted.” But the problem is that his man is in-charge of a deadly nuclear arsenal. The world has become a dangerous place.
