Using a little-known fleet of ships under U.S. sanctions, Syria has sharply increased its imports of wheat from the temporarily occupied Crimea this year, which is evidenced by strengthening of economic ties between the two countries.
Source. Reuters.
Details. The volume of wheat shipped to Syria from Sevastopol has increased 17-fold this year to more than 500,000 tonnes, according to Refinitiv shipping data, and accounts for almost a third of total grain imports to Syria.
As sanctions make it harder for Syria and russia to trade via conventional maritime transport and marine insurance, the two countries are increasingly using their own ships to transport grain, including three Syrian ships that are subject to U.S. sanctions.
Russian troops, despite military setbacks, still control parts of the agricultural areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
Both Ukrainian and the occupation authorities established by russia agree that some of the grain has been exported from the occupied Zaporizhzhia Oblast via Crimea.
Ukraine claims that at least part of the grain that passed through Sevastopol was taken out of Ukrainian territories after the russian invasion. The Ukrainian Embassy in Beirut, which tracks cargoes entering Syria, estimates that 500,000 tonnes of looted Ukrainian grain arrived in Syria after the russian invasion of Ukraine began.
The embassy said that these calculations and the Ukrainian authorities' allegations of grain theft are based on information from owners of fields and silages in the occupied territories, satellite data on the movement of trucks to ports, and tracking of ships.