This was already projected to happen due to covid19 restrictions eating away at all of the slack in the system. It's quite convenient that this war has come along and created cover for the problems generated by some of the more ham-fisted policies of the pandemic response. Which isn't to say the war isn't going to make things worse, it certain will but we were already at the tipping point and going over the edge no matter what happened next. Now the trip down is going to be even deeper and climb back out of the hole even more grueling. Too bad we created a situation where there is no slack left to compensate for events like this war.
You’re making the insinuations about how “convenient” it is and how you’re sure the war matters but it really doesn’t… but what are you actually trying to say? Is Putin trying to distract from his previous creation, COVID? No? Is somebody else trying to distract from COVID and forcing Russia to invade its neighbor? Why? How?
And what policies, exactly, have this impact on the food supply you are talking about? Because vaccinations and mask wearing doesn’t stop corn from growing, last I checked.
The way I read GP's post, it's more about plausible deniability.
As in the "ham-fisted Covid response" was going to have a bunch of ill-effects. But now that there's a war, which is going to increase those effects, and would have created them anyway, said governments have a scapegoat: "It's not our measures that have created these problems, it's the war. We can't be blamed!".
It's not a good argument. Both Russia and Ukraine are important wheat producers - without them the world may experience shortages, this is a direct result of the invasion and nothing to do with covid. Same goes for the current shipping crisis, it's caused directly by the economic effect of sanctions and the backlash felt on the supply chains. Maybe those problems were created by covid to some extent, but they were being ironed out already and some restrictions are being lifted right this moment. But the war exacerbated all of those problems.
