By Ilya Rogachev, Russia’s Ambassador to South Africa
Embassy’s reply to the article “SA must remember its friends” of 22 April 2023 published in the “Saturday Star” by news editor and senior writer Norman Cloete refers.
It is always sad to see the Western and Ukrainian propaganda use a respected South African outlet for disinformation. Regrettable as it is, the article “SA must remember its friends” by Saturday Star’s N Cloete covering “a Ukrainian civil society delegation’s” recent visit to SA is just another example of biased journalism.
Who are the imaginary “friends” the author refers to in the title, we wonder?
Readers will not be granted an answer. Is it the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, or, rather, the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was a part, who assisted liberation movements in Africa? Then are we supposed to ignore the 30 years of the policy of “decommunization/desovietization” and consistent Nazi glorification in the post-Soviet Ukraine?
Hard to tell since Kiev’s propaganda swings between the narratives – from Ukraine being an oppressed Russian “colony”, since 1944 according to Cloete, to an integral part of the USSR – depending strictly on possible benefits.
The article’s boldest deception though is arguing “Russia’s actions have devastated the global economy, choking off exports of wheat and grain and causing energy prices to increase dramatically”. We would like to stress once again that it is unilateral sanctions illegally imposed by the West against Russia that have complicated payment transactions and insurance procedures, disrupted logistics, and, in the end, led to the humanitarian consequences mentioned in the article.
In fact it happened even earlier: during the Covid-19 pandemic Western states have printed billions of dollars, euros, yen, etc, unsubstantiated by any goods produced or services provided, which led to price hikes in commodities markets well before the special military operation in Ukraine.
Yet the Western states (aka “the garden” according to Josep Borrell) do not seem to care about the rest of the world (aka “the jungle”), hypocritically claiming their discriminative restrictions have nothing to do with the agricultural sector and groundlessly blaming Russia for “weaponising food” (as though they themselves haven’t weaponised dollar and other currencies, smartphones and other high-tech goods that they used to export to Russia). They’d rather you didn’t know that the main beneficiaries of food price hikes are Western transnational corporations, namely Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge & Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, Monsanto, E.I. Dupont de Nemours.
Russian agricultural supplies to the world market which could bring relief to the food crisis are blocked by Western illegal sanctions. The Russian Agricultural Bank is disconnected from SWIFT, several key Russian companies’ assets in foreign banks are frozen, ammonia pipeline “Tolyatti-Odessa” (yearly transported 2.5 million tons of commodities for fertilisers) is blocked by Ukraine.
Since Aug 1, 2022, over 23 million tons of products (predominantly (70%) fodder corn and feed grain) were transported by Ukraine via the ports of Odessa, Yuzhny and Chernomorsk as part of the Black Sea Grain Deal, with 47% shipped to high-income countries, primarily in the EU, and 34% to upper-middle-income countries. The share of deliveries to needy countries has been steadily declining to less than 2.5%.
While the West uses the grain deal to boost Ukraine’s commercial exports, Russia declared itself willing to give 262,000 tons of fertilisers freely to the countries in need. But the cargoes are currently blocked in the ports of Belgium, Estonia, Latvia and the Netherlands.
They say a friend in need is a friend indeed. What are your criteria, Mr Cloete, in determining who the true friend of Africa is?
Read the original article here.