Silent on Deadly Missile Strike Near Odessa, Putin Shores Up Kremlin’s Caviar Supply

Pay attention to any war and there will be times when the surreal mixes with the painfully brutal. Just such a juxtaposition occurred this week, with missiles raining down on the Odessa region even as the man who sanctioned the strikes, Vladimir Putin, took substantive measures to guarantee the Kremlin’s stocks of caviar don’t run dry.At least three Russian missiles slammed into a residential building and two resorts at Serhiivka, some 31 miles from the port city of Odessa, in the early hours of July 1, killing at least 21 people, including a 12-year-old boy. President Zelensky denounced the attack as a “targeted act of terrorism against the Ukrainian people” and specified that the assault included Russian forces launching a Kh-22 supersonic anti-ship cruise missile, a type of missile “created to hit aircraft carriers and other large warships.”The AP reported that Ukrainian authorities interpreted the attack as payback for the forced withdrawal of Russian troops from Snake Island in the Black Sea a day earlier. “The occupiers cannot win on the battlefield, so they resort to vile killing of civilians,” the head of Ukraine’s security service, Ivan Bakanov, said. “After the enemy was dislodged from Snake Island, he decided to respond with the cynical shelling of civilian targets.”The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that Moscow was not targeting residential areas, and on Friday Mr. Putin, unphased by the news that sent shudders of revulsion through Ukraine’s most important port, was busying himself with sending video greetings to the Ninth Forum of Russian and Belarusian Regions. Earlier in the week he traveled to Turkmenistan to speak at the Caspian Summit, an event also attended by the leaders of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Iran. There, he said that Russia was “striving to make a significant contribution to solving the problems related to the conservation of the Caspian biodiversity,” namely by “releasing up to 40 million sturgeon fingerlings into the Caspian Sea annually, which results in over 80 percent of the so-called Russian sturgeon coming from Russian fish hatcheries today.”The roe of sturgeon fish are, of course, the basis for the rarified comestible that no luxury yacht’s pantry or Kremlin corner office can do without: caviar. The rapacious Russian president even had other environmental matters on his mind at the Turkmen capital. “We are successfully fulfilling projects on marine mammal and bird protection, removal of plastic from the sea, and many other things,” he said. Those other things include the planned launch of the Peter the Great, “the first cruise ship on the Caspian Sea.” Mr. Putin said the ship would be commissioned next year in the Russian region of Astrakhan, near the northern shore of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water. At neither Ashgabat nor at the virtual show of comity with vassal autocracy Belarus today did Mr. Putin mention the heavily mined and essentially blockaded Black Sea, from where Russian warplanes launched the missiles that struck Odessa today. He did take a moment to hit back at the giggle that the British and Canadian prime ministers had earlier this week at his expense. At the G7 summit Prime Minister Trudeau kidded that he and Prime Minister Johnson should “go bare-chested horseback riding,” to which Mr. Johnson replied the pair should “show them our pecs.” Mr. Putin had his rejoinder ready at the Caspian Summit: “I don’t know how they wanted to get undressed, above or below the waist,” he said. “But I think it would be a disgusting sight in any case.”

Silent on Deadly Missile Strike Near Odessa, Putin Shores Up Kremlin’s Caviar Supply

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