On: Major Russian grain export terminals hit in Ukraine Black Sea port attack

The grain markets are trembling like a nervous horse before the starting gun, and the reason is plain enough: the Black Sea has become a shooting gallery where the very lifeblood of Europe’s breadbasket is turned into shrapnel. Both sides have taken to blasting one another’s silos and ships as though the harvest itself were a legitimate target, and the result is a double blockade - one imposed by steel and shellfire, the other by the paralysed logic of reprisal. We have seen this story before, not in the ledgers of finance but in the famines of history; when the granaries of the Danube and the Volga fall silent, the stomachs of Marseilles and Milan begin to rumble. The ports of Odesa and Novorossiysk are now mere waypoints on a map of mutual destruction, and the tonnage of wheat that once fed a continent is being sunk beneath the waves as casually as yesterday’s newspaper.

The Kremlin’s admirals speak of “sanctions relief” while their gunners reduce the berths to scrap; the Ukrainian general staff calls it “defensive interdiction” when their missiles turn Russian elevators into pyres. Both narratives are as hollow as the hulls they now litter. The truth is that the world’s poorest will pay the freight of this maritime mayhem, and the poorest always pay in hunger what the powerful settle in pride. We are not merely witnessing an economic skirmish; we are re-enacting the tragedy of the 1930s, when autarky and blockade marched hand in hand toward the ration book and the soup kitchen.

The only remedy is to prise open a corridor that neither gunboat nor drone can close, and that corridor must run through diplomacy, not further artillery duels. If the belligerents refuse the table, then the neutrals must lay the tablecloth - Turkey, Egypt, the Gulf states - any port that can still float a barge without fear of mines or missiles. Let the grain ships fly the flags of the Red Crescent or the UN, and let the guns fall silent long enough to let the wheat pass. If we cannot feed the hungry while the war rages, then we have already lost the peace that follows the war.