This is some bullshit. The first time Russia blockaded Ukrainian grain in the Black Sea, they had the plausible deniability that they weren’t aware it was going to cause mass food shortages in poorer countries. Now they know full well that’s what will happen, and they’re doing it again.
The West would be justified in clearing a path in the Black Seas themselves, in my opinion. Russia’s being little terrorist bitches.
Nothing about blowing holes through Russian warships, simply escorting Ukrainian Black Sea grain shipments. Russia is free to fuck off or fire the first shot if they are that determined to let Africans starve from lack of grain.
Russia already has a presence in the Black Sea.
They are the ones who can currently block the harbors, and the US ships would have to fire the first shots to force them to leave, free the ports and even get to the Ukrainian ships to escort them.
Russian warships can’t get within 75 miles of Ukrainian held territory for fear of another Moskva sinking. If Russia wants to open fire on NATO warships on the open sea just so Africans can starve, that is on Russia.
There goes support from BRICS countries and the global south!
Russia had been busy acting as the anti-colonialist, getting even with their former masters… And there they go, suddenly proving they don’t give a flying fish about people in the south starving, and it’s all been a show. 😂
It’s not as black and white as that. There’s obviously a point where the West would have to push back against Russia. Most likely this grain deal won’t be enough for the West to make any significant new moves apart from what they’re already doing, but Russia is playing a stupid game by using mass hunger in poorer countries as a pawn in this war.
They’re in a lose/lose situation. If they don’t retaliate in some way, it weakens them. Since they can’t retaliate militarily or diplomatically, it has to be economically.
This just opens the door for Erdogan to demonstrate his worth to NATO though. He already threatened them with his navy once. He gets nothing but free brownie points for doing it again.
Turkey has the largest army in Europe at the moment with over 250k soldiers and is the second largest navy in the baltic black sea, maybe the strongest one actually.
Not particularly big, no. But neither is the Russian one, and it’s fairly modern.
The main issue is they can offer to escort civilian trading vessels. If Russian forces attempt to interdict and, even by accident, attack one of the Turkish warships, that is enough justification to trigger Article 5 if Turkey wished, and pull NATO wholesale into the conflict.
While we probably wouldn’t actually attack into Russia for fear of getting nuked, we could turn economic sanctions into an international blockade and eliminate every single Russian asset not hiding in Russia with warlike prejudice. Then just wait for the Ukrainians to beat them.
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