PAfter the start of the invasion launched by Russia, on February 24, 2022, Ukraine officially requested NATO to create a no-fly zone over its territory for Russian flying machines. Thousands of Ukrainians and pro-Ukrainian activists have launched a global campaign to “close the sky of Ukraine”.
NATO, however, immediately rejected kyiv’s request, apparently fearing that this decision would lead to an escalation of the conflict, which would lead to the outbreak of World War III.
In this heated debate on the creation of a no-fly zone for the whole of Ukraine, one element has been forgotten: the security of certain countries may be compromised by this conflict. The recent Russian attacks against grain warehouses and ports on the Ukrainian coasts of the Black Sea and the Danube are an illustration of this.
The rise in world grain prices following the Russian attacks is less of a problem for Ukraine than for grain-importing countries. The social, political and perhaps even military consequences of rising food costs in poor countries can be significant.
Terrorize or demoralize
The majority of Russian airstrikes in the Ukrainian hinterland do not pursue purely military objectives. Many attacks target civilian infrastructure in order to terrorize or demoralize the Ukrainian population. Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian food exports are also aimed at weakening the West’s resolve to support kyiv.
Moscow knows that new waves of migrants from Africa will head less to the Eurasian Economic Union (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia) than to the European Union (EU). Their arrival should generally benefit pro-Russian far-right parties, such as the Alternative for Germany.
It is surprising that these countries, which are not all Western, whose national interests may be threatened by what is happening on Ukrainian territory and whose armies would be able to defend them, do not do so. This is all the more surprising since Russia generally uses unmanned aerial vehicles, i.e. missiles and drones, in Ukraine. The Russian military does not send planes or helicopters directly over the front lines. It only uses them to fly over Ukrainian areas controlled by Russia.
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