Timid west must draw a line in the sea and break Putin’s criminal food blockade

theguardian.com:

How much longer can the western powers delay decisive action to break Russia’s illegal Black Sea food blockade? The UN warns this reckless maritime siege, now entering its fifth month, threatens “catastrophe on top of catastrophe” for tens of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people dependent on Ukraine’s grain exports. Yet Nato and EU leaders are visibly floundering, disunited and distracted as apocalyptic disaster looms.

Questions about the west’s response to the Ukraine invasion – what weapons to send, whether Nato should act more forcibly – must be viewed in this larger context: the necessity of defending fundamental humanitarian principles upon which the UN and the global rules-based order have been based for 75 years. It’s about blameless victims of a manmade atrocity. It’s about decency, about leadership.

What Vladimir Putin is doing, right now, by weaponising staple food prices, creating artificial shortages, and risking starvation and famine among 100 million people from the Horn of Africa and the Sahel to Central America, constitutes a crime against humanity. That’s an act purposefully committed by a state as part of a systematic policy directed against civilians. There is no argument. He’s gone rogue. He must be stopped.

Ideally, the Russian people would do this themselves. Yet out of fear, impotence or ignorance, most now occupy a moral vacuum where a respected country used to be. So what are Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and all the other democratic leaders waiting for? Putin is mining Odesa’s waters, bombing silos and stealing grain. How many children must die horribly before they draw a line in the sea?

Fear corrodes the will to act, even though rampant price inflation imperils