Written by Andrew E. Kramer
Their uniforms are dusty jeans and tank tops, and they drive tractors, not tanks, on the front lines of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
But Ukrainian farmers face many of the same grave dangers as soldiers as they harvest this year’s crop. Across Ukraine, Russian artillery and mines have killed tractor drivers. Thousands of hectares of ripe wheat have burned due to the strikes. Fields are marked where incoming shells have left craters.
Serhiy Sokol, a wheat, barley and sunflower farmer in southern Ukraine, said he and his peasants tore dozens of aluminum tubes from Russian rockets out of the black earth as they worked their fields. Last month, he said, a neighbor’s harvester hit a mine, blowing out one of its fat tires but sparing the driver.
“There were a lot of cluster munitions in the fields,” Sokol said with a shrug. “We just took a chance, and thank God no one was hurt.”
After all of Sokol’s trouble, with his barley crop drying in storage, a Russian artillery shell hit his silo. A dozen tons of grain were burned.
The breakthrough agreement that allowed ships carrying grain to leave southern Ukrainian ports this week may have solved a diplomatic problem, but it has left a more pragmatic one for Ukraine’s farming community: to grow and harvest crops in a war zone, as the rain of powerful weapons destroys. in some of the richest agricultural lands in the world.
Farmers say they have little choice. Much of Ukraine’s grain crop is winter wheat and barley, sown in early fall and harvested the following summer. After planting before the war began, farmers near the front must take risks now, lest they lose their entire year’s investment.
Ukraine is one of the world’s largest grain exporting nations, and its profitable agricultural industry is a cornerstone of the country’s economy, accounting for around 11% of gross domestic product and creating around a million jobs. Agriculture is even more important for export earnings, accounting for 41% of all Ukrainian exports last year. But the Russians had hampered Ukraine’s export capacity, blocking shipping routes to the Black Sea and, according to Ukraine, stealing grain from the occupied territory.
Hopes for Ukrainian agriculture rose this week as the first grain ship, carrying 26,000 tonnes of maize, left the port of Odesa under a deal brokered by Turkey and endorsed by the United Nations and with the intention of alleviating hunger in the developing world.
Escorted on Monday by sea mines protecting the port and Russian warships further out to sea, the ship arrived in Turkish waters on Wednesday, where it was inspected and cleared to sail to Lebanon. More ships will follow. The deal is expected to allow the export of about 5 million tons of grain a month, reducing about 20 million tons of grain in silos from last year, freeing up storage space for the harvest this year
But planting and harvesting have become such daunting undertakings that Ukraine will inevitably have less to export this year and in the future, given the obstacles to agriculture. The US Department of Agriculture, for example, has forecast that Ukraine’s wheat exports, worth $5.1 billion last year, will be cut in half after this year’s harvest.
In fields along a section of the front line where the Ukrainian military is pressing a counteroffensive against Russian forces, sunflowers, wheat and barley crops stretch to the horizon.
This is the great sky country of Ukraine: vast expanses of flat land, laid out in a checkerboard of gigantic fields.
Closer to the front, heavy Ukrainian military trucks pass the back roads, along with tractors and combines carrying the harvest.
Every few minutes, there is a distant rumble of artillery. On the horizon, swirls of smoke blow in the wind from burning fields.
Ukrainian farmers and soldiers say the Russian military is intentionally shooting ripe wheat and barley to start fires, as a form of economic sabotage. There is also random destruction, as Russian fire aimed at military targets also risks igniting fields.
“They see the combinations and shoot them,” said Yevhen Sytnychenko, head of the military administration in the Kryvyi Rih district, interviewed next to a burning field on a recent tour of front-line farms. “They do it so we don’t have grain, so we can’t eat and we can’t export.”
Sgt. Serhiy Tarasenko, whose soldiers with the 98th Infantry Brigade have been fighting in farmland south of the city of Kryvyi Rih, said Russian artillery has targeted tractors and combines, which are detected by drones.
“They are shooting at the local people who collect the grain,” he said. “These are people who have invested their money and now they have to reap. But now they’re doing it under fire, under attack.”
For Ukrainians, the burning fields are an emotionally charged and exasperating development, even in a war with no shortage of other outrages. It recalls, Sytnychenko said, the Soviet Union’s grain requisitions in the 1930s that led to a famine that historians say killed at least 3 million Ukrainians, a tragedy known as the Holodomor. “They used to confiscate the grain, and today they burn it,” he said.
Ukraine also faces immediate economic consequences. The Ministry of Agriculture has cited studies showing the war will cost farmers and agribusinesses $23 billion this year in lost earnings, destroyed equipment and higher transportation costs.
Ukrainian farmers and the government have been adapting, finding solutions to blocked transport routes, setting up temporary places to store grain and trying to clear mines from fields to bring in the harvest. The crops most affected are wheat, barley and sunflower, as they are grown in areas close to the fighting, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.
“While Russia is blackmailing the world with hunger, we are trying to prevent a global food crisis,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said of efforts to maintain Ukrainian farm production.
Crop fires caused by artillery strikes are reducing the harvest. There have been more than 3,000 wildfires, according to Olena Kryvoruchkina, a member of Parliament.
Tractors and combines have hit landmines in northern Ukraine even months after Russia withdrew. Late last month, for example, a tractor hit a mine on the outskirts of Kharkiv, killing the driver. The tractor burned in the field.
Outside Sokol’s hometown in south-central Ukraine, two combines, including the John Deere operated by his neighbor, hit landmines in the last two weeks of July.
The remains of rockets from the Sokol fields now lie in a yard along with tractor tires and sacks of grain. A pile of a dozen dented, slate-gray tubes and fins lean against a wall.
“I’m angry,” he said. “How angry? I want them dead. That’s how I feel right now.”
In the fields on a recent, sweltering afternoon during harvest, flames shot through the stubble of Vasyliy Tabachnyuk’s recently harvested wheat crop, picking up in gusts of wind.
Tabachnyuk, whose fields are a few kilometers from the front, said he was lucky to have harvested early. After previous strikes, he has sent tractor drivers into burning fields to cut the firebreaks, trying to save what grain he could. A strike burned about 200 hectares of ripe wheat.
If the Ukrainian counteroffensive doesn’t push the Russians back before winter wheat is planted in September, he said, he wouldn’t plant next year.
“All agriculture will be out of business,” he said, standing in the scorched field, where the ground was covered with charred grains of wheat.
“The wheat was ripe,” he said. “She should have been picked.”