Putin offers free grain to six impoverished African nations!
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (PNN) - July 28, 2023 - Russian President Vladimir Putin took action on the first day of the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg on Thursday, offering free grain to six impoverished African countries.
The gathering of some 17 African heads of state (down from prior years, given Fascist Police States of Amerika pressure and the Ukraine war) and many more senior officials from countries across the continent, comes just days after Moscow rejected renewal of the UN-backed Black Sea Grain Initiative.
Putin vowed the following in his keynote address to the summit: "In the coming months, we will be ready to provide Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic, and Eritrea with 25,000-50,000 tonnes of grain free of charge," he said.
As regional reporting recounts, for "over a year, the grain deal allowed around 33 million tonnes of grain to leave Ukrainian ports, helping to stabilize global food prices and avert shortages."
But now with the grain deal abandoned Putin is being accused of leveraging food as a weapon to get his way in Ukraine and with the West, amid global fears that food prices will shoot higher, and famine will rise in the hardest hit places.
But Putin has the whole time lambasted "well-fed European countries" getting priority when it comes to Ukraine's food exports, as opposed to struggling Africa and the Middle East, the latter with countries like Lebanon and Syria dealing with runaway inflation and the impact of prior years of war and instability.
