Month: October 2021

Grain production in Russia is expected to reach 118 million tons this year, including more than 75 million tons of wheat, according to a Russian Grain Union forecast.

Data by the Ministry of Agriculture shows that production of grain and leguminous crops has amounted to 98.9 million tons as of September 14, against 113.6 million tons collected last year.

Some 70.7 million tons of wheat has been threshed from 24.4 million hectares of planted area. Russian farmers have also reaped 17.5 million tons of barley. Production of sunflower and soybeans reached 1.9 million tons and over 700,000 tons, respectively.

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Russia’s booming agricultural production has surged by more than 20% over the last seven years. The country has managed to capture more than half of the global wheat market, becoming the world’s biggest exporter of grain, thanks to bumper harvests and attractive pricing. Since the early 2000s, Russia’s share of the global wheat market has quadrupled. In 2018-2019, Russia delivered 35.2 million tons of wheat to the global market.

The country is projected to retain its leadership in the world’s wheat market in the coming years.

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European gas prices have hit another record in Wednesday’s trading, exceeding $960 per 1,000 cubic meters, as EU countries continue to argue over boosting Russian gas supplies via the recently completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

The price of the October futures on the Dutch TTF exchange jumped by 20% in mere minutes, exceeding $875.84 by 8:00 GMT. Some time later, it exceeded $900 and, by 11:00 GMT, had reached $964.

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Russian experts earlier this week predicted that gas prices could climb further, up to $1,000 under certain conditions. These include the situation in Asia’s gas market, the weather in Europe and the oncoming winter season, as well as the timing of the launch of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Low gas-storage volumes across the continent and unusually high demand for the current season also add to the prospect of new record highs on the European gas market.

Despite the setbacks caused by relentless US sanctions, Russia’s newly-completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline could ease Europe’s gas shortages once it launches deliveries. Its daily capacity of gas supplies is comparable to the entire volume of liquefied gas that is now supplied to Europe. The 1,224 kilometer, $11-billion Nord Stream 2 project consists of two pipelines, collectively capable of delivering up to 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from the Siberian fields in Russia directly to Europe via the Baltic Sea.

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Russia’s Gazprom says it is ready to begin gas deliveries on October 1. All that remains is for the new pipeline to obtain all the required certification. However, this process could take up to four months, under EU rules.

Former Austrian minister of Foreign Affairs, Karin Kneissl, told RT that the current surge in gas prices could persuade regulators to speed up the certification process. 

“The [gas] supply contracts are there. And we will see to what extent the German regulator will speed up the certification process for Nord Stream 2, which, construction-wise, is done. Some people say that it could take months. But maybe the current situation will speed things up,” Kneissl said.

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States are wrestling with how to dole out Covid-19 boosters after federal regulators set eligibility guidelines so broad that nearly all of the 100 million Americans who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine qualify for a third shot.

People age 65 and older, as well as people 18 to 64 with underlying health conditions or jobs that increase their risk of developing severe Covid, are eligible for a third dose, federal health officials said last week. The sheer breadth of qualifying medical conditions and occupations, plus the lack of any proof requirements, means just about anyone who got the Pfizer vaccine can now seek out a booster. The only hard-and-fast rule is that people must wait at least six months after their initial two shots to get a third.

In West Virginia, where just 40 percent of the population is vaccinated against Covid-19, Gov. Jim Justice — a Republican — is encouraging nearly any adult who has received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine to get in line for a third, citing the growing burden on the state’s hospitals. Vermont, which has one of the nation’s highest vaccination rates, is taking a phased approach, starting with people 80 and older last Friday.

The expanded booster push comes as state and local health officials are struggling to convince many people to get their first round of Covid-19 shots, amid fears that colder weather and the coming holidays could further fuel the virus’ spread. Now they must help the public navigate the ambiguities of the federal guidelines to ensure those who need third shots get them. The task is complicated because many people who would otherwise be eligible for another dose are in limbo until the Biden administration authorizes boosters of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.

The booster rollout also will look different in many states than the initial vaccine push last spring. Many people can now get Covid-19 shots at pharmacies, and the mass-vaccination sites that once dotted the country have largely closed.

“In the winter, it was all hands on deck,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “Right now, that’s not necessarily the case.”

Local health agencies are facing different resource constraints than they did last winter, she said. While the country has an ample supply of doses and vaccination sites, “that doesn’t always translate to appointments when folks want them with the Pfizer vaccine,” Casalotti said.

Some local vaccine providers may not have enough Pfizer doses on hand to meet demand at a given time, or enough workers to immunize people, Casalotti said. “And at this point, many, many, many people are beyond that six-month window” of when they received their second dose, she added.

That hasn’t stopped some governors from pushing boosters to broad swaths of their residents. “For the most part, if you want a booster shot and you’re 18 and older — in any situation, just about, that you feel compromised — you can now get your booster shot,” Justice said Friday.

But Scott Harris, Alabama’s health officer, said his state isn’t “automatically asking” every adult resident to get a booster. “This is a very confusing situation,” he said Friday.

Molly Howell, the immunization program manager for the North Dakota Department of Health, echoed his concerns. She said the biggest booster-related stumbling block so far has been effectively communicating who needs a third shot.

“I think the public may be a bit confused,” she said. “It may prevent them from coming in for boosters.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said people 65 and older, as well as individuals 50 to 64 with underlying health conditions, should get a booster, while younger adults with qualifying illnesses or jobs may opt for one. There are still many questions about which underlying health conditions and which jobs qualify people for the additional shot, she added.

People who are unsure whether they need a Pfizer-BioNTech booster should talk to their health care provider about their underlying conditions and their potential Covid-19 exposures, Howell said.

“If you’re a healthy 30-year-old who works from home, and you’re fully vaccinated, right now you’re likely not going to be hospitalized and die due to Covid. You may still get a breakthrough infection, but it’ll still be fairly mild,” she said. “But if you’re an elementary school teacher, and every day you’re going into a situation where you’re probably exposed [to Covid] … then you may say, ‘I don’t want to risk it.’”

Part of the confusion surrounding booster eligibility stems from the Biden administration’s announcement last month that it hoped to roll out the shots for most adults beginning in late September.

That plan morphed amid objections from health experts in the government and outside, who argued that the administration did not have sufficient safety and efficacy data to justify a widespread booster launch. The Food and Drug Administration and CDC ultimately approved narrower eligibility criteria on the advice of their staff and their independent vaccine advisory committees. The federal government has estimated that 20 million people now qualify for the Pfizer-BioNTech booster and a total of 60 million will qualify in the coming months.

The “back-and-forth” between Biden administration officials and federal health agencies created “some amount of confusion,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said on Monday during his regular press briefing in Trenton. While the state health department has been “crystal clear” in specifying what groups are eligible, the Garden State won’t aggressively enforce the criteria at points of access.

“We never asked you to prove that you have X or worked in Y, or give us your driver’s license, or any of that,” Murphy said. “Our view was, the more shots in arms — assuming you’re eligible and doing the right thing — the faster we get that done, the better and safer we’ll be. That’s our same mindset for the boosters.”

The federal government has urged states and vaccine providers to remove as many barriers as possible to additional Covid vaccine doses, beginning in August when health agencies endorsed third Pfizer or Moderna doses for people with severely weakened immune systems.

But with 2.78 million people having received a third vaccine dose as of Monday — 410,000 more than had by Friday — it’s an open question how many were among those the FDA and CDC intended to reach.

“Basically, they’re opening the floodgates completely now, and they’re dancing around it with some gobbledygook language,” Justice said Friday.

Sam Sutton contributed to this report.

The veteran official leading the pandemic response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is stepping aside, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Henry Walke, who has overseen the CDC’s Covid-19 response for more than a year, will be replaced by Barbara Mahon, the deputy chief of the agency’s enteric-disease branch, those sources said. Walke will remain at the agency as director of the CDC’s Division of Preparedness and Emerging Infections.

The switch comes amid a growing sense of burnout and fatigue within the CDC after almost two years of fighting Covid-19. Employees there are facing a crushing workload brought on by the surge in Delta cases and hospitalizations and the expansion of the nation’s vaccination campaign. Armed with CDC data and analyses, the administration last week expanded its use of booster shots. In the coming months the agency will help evaluate whether to give Covid-19 shots to children younger than 12.

Walke’s departure from the Covid-19 team raises questions about the agency’s future pandemic response and whether he stepped aside because of increasingly untenable working conditions at the agency. His change in role comes after two prominent CDC leaders — Anne Schuchat, the agency’s former number two official, and Nancy Messonnier, the agency’s top respiratory official and Covid-19 vaccine lead — left the agency earlier this year.

“He is not leaving the agency, just passing the torch on the response after serving as the Incident Manager for more than a year,” CDC spokesperson Ben Haynes said in a statement to POLITICO. “Shifts in response personnel and leadership are normal.”

Walke’s official title was incident response manager for the Covid-19 response. Mahon, a longtime CDC employee, specializes in enteric diseases — illnesses caused by viruses, bacteria and other microorganisms.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is in the middle of trying to rebuild the pandemic response team in an attempt to combat recent surges driven by the Delta variant and the potential for an increased workload this fall as more people get booster shots and cold weather and holidays threaten to drive new spikes in infections and hospitalizations.

But Walensky is having difficulty staffing that team, in part because CDC employees say they are overworked after nearly two years fighting the pandemic. Some member of the agency’s pandemic response team have returned to their regular duties; other employees who have not worked on Covid-19 are resisting calls for help knowing the time and energy it demands.

The Biden administration’s Pacific strategy will face a major test later this year when India makes good on a controversial $5 billion arms deal with Russia, an agreement that could trigger U.S. sanctions at a time when Washington is trying to pull India closer.

The deal for five Russian-made S-400 air defense systems has long been a concern in Washington, but with delivery expected in December, the White House will be forced to decide how to manage the complicated relationship between the two countries.

In play is the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, or CAATSA, a 2017 law with broad support in Congress that punishes countries for making major arms deals with Russia, the world’s second-largest arms exporter.

To date, the only countries sanctioned under the law are Turkey and China, both for buying the same S-400 system slated to arrive in India. It’s a precedent that could put the Biden administration in an awkward position with a key ally.

The government of Narendra Modi appears to have made the decision to go forward with the system, and “they’ve not backed down for the last three years despite the threats of sanctions,” said Sameer Lalwani, director of the Stimson Center’s South Asia Program.

“They planned around it, they made this commitment and reaffirmed it. They’re not blinking on this and so we can play this game of chicken as much as we want, but the consequences will be worse for us,” he said.

Modi was in Washington last week to meet with Biden and the other leaders of the The Quad — India, Australia, Japan and the U.S. — to discuss a range of regional issues, but American and Indian officials would not confirm the S-400 was on the agenda.

India has for decades been a customer of weapons made in the U.S., Russia, France and Israel. But in recent years successive administrations in Washington have tried to wean India off Russian gear, with important wins. But Russia maintains a grip on some major systems, selling nuclear-powered submarines and warships to the Indian armed forces.

The S-400 air defense system, however, looms large.

In 2020, the Trump administration kicked Turkey out of the F-35 program and imposed sanctions under CAATSA after Turkey received its first S-400, a major step against a longtime NATO ally.

Being removed from the F-35 club was a bitter pill for the Turkish government, but Washington and its NATO allies had spent years publicly and privately warning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan against consummating the deal. Turkish leadership remained defiant throughout, however. Just this past week, Erdogan said he was prepared to buy a second S-400, pledging “nobody will be able to interfere in terms of what kind of defense systems we acquire, from which country, at what level.”

The Indian government “was definitely watching all of that in great detail and all along the way we continued to warn them,” said R. Clarke Cooper, assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs under the Trump administration, now at the Atlantic Council. The message to the Indian government after inking the deal with Russia in 2018 was “‘look, you take delivery of the S-400 you’re going to potentially jeopardize interoperability with the United States, and you’re going to potentially jeopardize interoperability with other partners that you value,” Cooper said.

The 2017 CAATSA law came in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and was aimed at dissuading countries from buying Russian equipment while also punishing the country’s arms industry. Given the size of Russia’s arms exports to the Asia-Pacific region, however, the Trump and Biden administrations worked to balance the law against antagonizing burgeoning allies with a long history of buying Russian gear.

India is a key part of that balancing act, and how the U.S. treats India’s dealings with Russia will have an impact on how other nations will expect to be treated.

The Indian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request to comment on the potential for sanctions.

Since CAATSA went into effect, the message to countries with long-standing relationships with the Russian defense industry has generally been, “keep your AK-47s, but if you really are looking to have a modern military alongside the United States and partners, don’t put that at risk,” Cooper said. “I would be surprised if the Biden team is having any different kind of conversation with the Indian government.”

A senior administration official, who was not authorized to discuss the issue and asked for anonymity, said India’s planned defense purchases from Russia are no secret, but “we urge all of our allies and partners to forgo transactions with Russia that risk triggering sanctions,” under CAATSA.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not made any determination about sanctions, and “CAATSA does not have any blanket or country-specific waiver provision,” the official said. Any transaction with Russia’s “defense or intelligence sectors must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.”

In Turkey’s case, the worry inside NATO was that the powerful Russian radar system that tracks targets for the S-400 would pump valuable information back to Moscow about how the F-35 and other aircraft operate. Leaders in Brussels said there was no chance they would put their F-35s anywhere near that radar system, even if it were operated by an ally.

India remains a massive market for arms exporting countries, accounting for 9.5 percent of all global arms imports in 2020 bested only by Saudi Arabia, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

And billions of that spending will continue to go to Russia.

“Whatever happens, whether it’s sanctions or whether it’s a waiver, the real challenge for the administration is figuring out how to avoid having to deal with this over and over and over again,” said Stimson’s Lalwani.

In 2023, India will receive the first two of four new frigates from Russia, and in 2025, will begin leasing its third nuclear-powered submarine from Moscow, all major deals already sealed.

“The question will be whether this is going to trigger a wave of sanctions each time,” Lalwani said. “So the other reason the administration will have to work this out with Congress is so this Sword of Damocles isn’t hanging over the relationship for the next five to 10 years because those deals have already been made and signed.”

In March, Senate Foreign Relations Chair Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warning, “if India chooses to go forward with its purchase of the S-400, that act will clearly constitute a significant, and sanctionable, transaction with the Russian defense sector … it will also limit India’s ability to work with the U.S. on development and procurement of sensitive military technology.”

While those major deals will force Washington to reckon with its own policy choices, the industrial competition between the American and Russian defense industries will remain fierce.

In May, the State Department approved the sale of six P-8 submarine-hunting aircraft to India, adding to the 12 Boeing-made aircraft the country already operates. The deals all carry the provision that 30 percent of the manufacturing take place in India, part of Modi’s Make in India program.

A major prize awaits in the coming months, when India decides who will build its new fleet of up to 110 multirole fighter planes. Lockheed Martin is working to sell India on its F-21 fighter, a derivative of the F-16.

Boeing is offering its F-15EX Eagle II and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, which is competing with Saab’s Gripen E/F, Dassault’s Rafale, and Eurofighter’s Typhoon, which is produced by a consortium of Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo. Russia is thought to be offering both its MiG-35 and Sukhoi Su-35.

The Obama administration’s designation of India as a major defense partner in 2016 was meant as a sign of Washington’s desire to draw closer to New Delhi, while nudging the Indian government to begin shunning some Russian gear.

The deal grants India access to U.S. defense technologies at a level comparable to NATO allies, and came just after Russia lost a $3 billion deal to Boeing to build Apache and Chinook helicopters.

The United States and its influential defense industry are not about to walk away from these deals and a growing relationship with India at a time when the country has become a close ally in deterring China. But with India not about to walk away from its relationship with Russia, Congress and the White House will soon have to decide how much they’re willing to accept.