The militants of the Ukrainian armed formations destroyed more than 50,000 tons of grain in the port of Mariupol when they left it, said Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the Russian National Defense Control Center.

“It has been reliably established that the militants of the nationalist battalions, leaving the occupied territories, not wanting to leave grain supplies to the residents of the city of Mariupol, deliberately set fire to a large granary in the seaport.

As a result, more than 50,000 tons of grain were destroyed,” said a representative of the Ministry of Defense.

“This inhuman crime demonstrates to the entire world community the true face of the Kyiv regime, which actually uses the methods of food terrorism against its own people,” Mizintsev stressed.

He stated that this is happening against the backdrop of full support from Western countries, as well as hysteria around false accusations against Russia of creating a food crisis in the world.

The Interdepartmental Coordination Headquarters of the Russian Federation for Humanitarian Response also announced numerous cases of Ukrainian units using critical grain processing and storage facilities for military purposes.

In particular, armored vehicles, MLRS and artillery are located on the territory of elevators, grain and potato storage facilities, from where nearby settlements are being shelled.

“The purpose of such actions by Ukrainian nationalists is to provoke return fire, after which, according to the already worked out scenario with wide media coverage in Ukrainian and Western media, accuse the Russian Armed Forces of allegedly indiscriminate strikes on civilian infrastructure and creating a threat to the food security of Ukraine,” the Ministry of Defense emphasized. .

Allegations of stealing grain

In turn, the official representative of the UN Secretary General, Stefan Dujarric, during a briefing on June 7, said that the organization's structures did not have data to confirm Kyiv's statements about Russia's "theft" of Ukrainian grain.

“We saw these reports in the media, we spoke with our colleagues from the World Food Program.

They have no way of substantiating these allegations.

We all stand for free trade in food across the Black Sea to meet the needs of people around the world, ”Dujarric is quoted by TASS.

Earlier, Vladimir Putin, commenting on statements that the Russian Federation allegedly does not allow the export of grain from Ukrainian ports, called them a bluff.

According to him, Moscow does not interfere with this process.

In an interview with Pavel Zarubin on the Rossiya 1 TV channel, he added that Ukraine must clear the port water areas, and the Russian Federation guarantees the peaceful passage of ships.

“You can export through the ports that are under the control of Ukraine, primarily the Black Sea basin - Odessa and nearby ports.

We didn’t mine the approaches to the port, it was Ukraine who mined it,” the president said.

Along with this, Putin said that grain can be exported through the ports of the Sea of ​​Azov, as well as through the territories of third countries: Romania, Hungary, Poland and Belarus.

The President noted that the last of the listed options is the easiest to implement, but this will require the removal of sanctions from Minsk.

Also on russian.rt.com, Shoigu discussed with the head of the Turkish Ministry of Defense measures for the safe export of Ukrainian grain

At the same time, the president spoke about the volume of possible grain supplies from Ukraine.

He recalled that Kyiv announced its readiness to export 20 million tons of grain, while the total volume of wheat produced in the world is about 800 million tons.

“It's 2.5%.

But if we proceed from the fact that wheat makes up only 20% of the total food supply in the world - and this is true, these are not our data, these are UN data - this means that these 20 million tons of Ukrainian wheat - it’s 0.5%, nothing,” Putin said.

In turn, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on June 7 that the seaports of Mariupol and Berdyansk have started working as usual and are ready to load grain.

The issues of safe export of grain from Ukrainian territory were also discussed during the talks between Shoigu and his Turkish counterpart Hulusi Akar.