Farmers across Europe have taken to the streets this year, convinced that cheap Ukrainian produce spilling over the border is to blame for their woes.

The mass protests have forced EU governments from Warsaw to Paristo make huge concessions to farmers, and have sent Kyiv’s political ties with its Western allies spiraling to their weakest since Russia’s full-scale invasion over two years ago.

Newly reelected Russian President Vladimir Putin must be rubbing his hands with glee.

After all, he is the real mastermind behind the crisis.

The main reason why EU farmers can’t sell their own goods this year has nothing to do with Ukraine and its huge agricultural sector.

Instead, it is Russia, whose own record farm output — and world-beating exports — have driven crop prices down to the point where farmers everywhere are hurting.

“It’s absolutely the case that Russia is using its food exports, particularly wheat exports, as a form of soft power,” said Caitlin Welsh, director of the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and co-author of a recent paper on Russia’s growing dominance of global agricultural markets at Ukraine’s expense.

Aided by extremely favorable weather, Russia has grown unprecedented amounts of wheat over the past two years and sold it cheaply on the world market.

That has reversed a boom in grain prices, and driven them down to prewar levels that are uneconomic for farmers in countries like Poland. They responded by blocking the border with Ukraine at the start of this year, blaming their eastern neighbor for making their own harvest unprofitable.

The protests have threatened Poland’s fragile coalition government, forcing Prime Minister Donald Tusk to go on a charm offensive to convince other EU capitals of the need to limit Ukrainian grain imports into the bloc — most recently winning the support of French President Emmanuel Macron, who is also under fire from farmers at home.

With all the attention on Ukrainian imports, several EU countries have continued to tap into cheap Russian produce. Spain, Italy and France are regular buyers of Russian grain.

Urged by Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and other eastern EU countries, the European Commission is poised to reimpose tariffs on the imports from Russia, which would effectively double their price and crush demand.

However, market analysts see the move as more of a distraction than a real solution to the difficult economic situation facing European farmers, given the relatively low share of the EU market accounted for by imports.

Amid the political turmoil in the EU, Russia has largely managed to divert attention away from itself, redirecting its prodigious wheat exports to other regions of the world, where it has sought to maintain geopolitical influence.

Over the past year, Moscow has sent hundreds of thousands of tons of free grain to countries in Africa and Asia, currying favor with authoritarian regimes there and helping them stave off civil unrest.

Putin’s foreign affairs envoy Sergey Lavrov has also signed lucrative deals with Brazil, Mexico and other Latin American countries whose own harvests have been decimated by extreme weather.

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The Attritional Art of War: Lessons from the Russian War on Ukraine

Alex Vershinin
18 March 2024Long Read

If the West is serious about the possibility of a great power conflict, it needs to take a hard look at its capacity to wage a protracted war and to pursue a strategy focused on attrition rather than manoeuvre.

Attritional wars require their own ‘Art of War’ and are fought with a ‘force-centric’ approach, unlike wars of manoeuvre which are ‘terrain-focused’. They are rooted in massive industrial capacity to enable the replacement of losses, geographical depth to absorb a series of defeats, and technological conditions that prevent rapid ground movement. In attritional wars, military operations are shaped by a state’s ability to replace losses and generate new formations, not tactical and operational manoeuvres. The side that accepts the attritional nature of war and focuses on destroying enemy forces rather than gaining terrain is most likely to win.

The West is not prepared for this kind of war. To most Western experts, attritional strategy is counterintuitive. Historically, the West preferred the short ‘winner takes all’ clash of professional armies. Recent war games such as CSIS’s war over Taiwan covered one month of fighting. The possibility that the war would go on never entered the discussion. This is a reflection of a common Western attitude. Wars of attrition are treated as exceptions, something to be avoided at all costs and generally products of leaders’ ineptitude. Unfortunately, wars between near-peer powers are likely to be attritional, thanks to a large pool of resources available to replace initial losses. The attritional nature of combat, including the erosion of professionalism due to casualties, levels the battlefield no matter which army started with better trained forces. As conflict drags on, the war is won by economies, not armies. States that grasp this and fight such a war via an attritional strategy aimed at exhausting enemy resources while preserving their own are more likely to win. The fastest way to lose a war of attrition is to focus on manoeuvre, expending valuable resources on near-term territorial objectives. Recognising that wars of attrition have their own art is vital to winning them without sustaining crippling losses

Top Zelenskyy adviser condemns EU protectionism

Mykhailo Podolyak warns Russia is seeking to wear down the West with a long war.

The Kremlin, he added, is preparing for a prolonged conflict and is stalling for time to make the war more expensive for Western countries and Ukraine.

“Russia is interested in a long war and in Western countries getting tired and saying, ‘that’s it, let’s look for some kind of compromise solution.’ But there’s no compromise solution in this war,” he said.

On Tuesday, Moscow claimed its troops had made advances in eastern Ukraine, adding to a string of gains since the capture of the city of Avdiivka last month. The Russian defense ministry said its troops had overrun the village of Orlivka.

Podolyak said he was “still optimistic about the position of the United States” despite the political battles raging as the country gears up for a tough presidential election pitting President Joe Biden against former President Donald Trump.

He said he’s banking on U.S. lawmakers eventually understanding that backing Ukraine is essential. “Investing in Ukraine is an investment in America’s reputation, in its dominance, in its right to prescribe global rules and to make sure they’re not violated,” he said.

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​​​​​​​ Western powers must realize that this war is about more than just Ukraine, Podolyak said.

“This is a war about the rules under which you will live, we will live, Russia will live,” he added. “If Russia does not lose, then the rules will be a little different. Autocracy, violence, these will be the dominant forms of foreign policy manifestations.”

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MARCH 21, 2024 11:55 PM CET
BY BARBARA MOENS AND JACOPO BARIGAZZIEU leaders agree more money should go into arming Ukraine. They just can't agree on how to do that.

"Let's be honest: nothing real is decided on financing defense," said one EU official after a summit of leaders in Brussels.

EU leaders on Thursday in Brusselsagreed to push the European Investment Bank to be more flexible in its lending policy to defense companies, which is now too risky for the bank.
But they disagreed on the bigger picture of a grand push for European financing of weapons to Ukraine, for example through defense bonds.

The possibility of EU joint bonds is backed by France, Estonia, Poland and others but strongly opposed by the more frugal countries, such as Germany, The Netherlands and Austria.

The discussion in the room among the 27 European Union leaders on Thursday reflected these divisions, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and The Netherlands' Mark Rutte reiterating their opposition, two EU diplomats who were granted anonymity to speak freely of the discussion, told POLITICO.

EU leaders asked the European Commission to "explore all options for mobilising funding and report back by June" in language pushed by the Baltics, Poland and Greece.

“The debate is at the beginning and not at its end,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday evening.

The BBC recently reported that 650,000 Ukrainian men of fighting age have fled the country in the past two years, most slipping across its borders with Poland and Slovakia, some with false exemption papers allowing them to exit Ukraine despite a ban on fighting-age men leaving the country.

Last year nearly 1,300 draft-dodgers found themselves before the courts, but officials acknowledge this is just a small fraction of those avoiding enlistment. A draft system is in effect to supplement the ranks of volunteers, but lawmakers say it is dysfunctional and is hampered by the failure of thousands to register their details and whereabouts. Enforcement is haphazard, depending largely on random spot checks of documents by police, who are more vigilant in some areas of the country than in others.

In December Zelenskyy said 450,000 to 500,000 extra soldiers would be needed to resist Russia in 2024. The Ukrainian parliament has for weeks been considering fresh mobilization legislation, which would see the minimum conscription age lowered from 27 to 25. The age was in fact lowered in separate legislation last July and approved by parliament, but Zelenskyy never signed it into law. He hasn't fully explained why.

The new draft legislation has been re-written several times and envisages a call-up of another 400,000 Ukrainian troops. It has stalled in the parliament, however, with lawmakers objecting to some punitive measures they regard as unconstitutional, such as restricting the property rights of draft-dodgers, impounding their cars and blocking their bank accounts.“That’s highly unpopular,” said Mykola Kniazhytskyi, an opposition lawmaker from Lviv. “Truth be told, mobilization is a hot political potato, and no one wants to be holding it. The army needs many more people. But Zelenskyy doesn’t want to take responsibility for the mobilization and says it is up to government ministries, and they’re afraid of getting their hands burned and say it is up to the parliament, which then passes the buck back.

“Even most lawmakers from Zelenskyy’s own party [Servant of the People] are against the legislation, saying it falls foul of European human rights conventions,” Kniazhytskyi added. “This is becoming a real mess. In Lviv, people are buying apartments but don't sign a purchase agreement to avoid it being formally registered, or they register it in a friend’s name because they’re afraid later it could be confiscated. Others are emptying bank accounts in case legislation is approved and their money [is] frozen.”

What isn’t helping, he and other lawmakers say, is the frequent talk from the frontlines about the lack of weapons and artillery shells. “You have officers going on television saying if we don't get more money and ammunition from the United States and Europe everyone at the front is going to get killed in a matter of weeks because the Russians produce many drones and have more shells,” Kniazhytskyi fumed. Such prognoses aren’t helping persuade reluctant Ukrainians like Artem to join up.

“There’s no real political will to pass a legislation that would actually work efficiently — it has been postponed so many times already,” said former Deputy Prime Minister Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, now an opposition lawmaker.



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