World Briefing Plus: Grain, Oil, and Gaslighting
Odesa’s battered port, Trump’s Venezuela pitch that no one’s buying, and Iran’s unrest - a World Briefing Plus analysis of crises ignored at the world’s peril.
This week’s World Briefing Plus comes from Odesa, where the war is anything but abstract. Just a day before filming, Russian drones tore through the sky above the Black Sea - one intercepted almost directly overhead - while others struck commercial shipping in the port, damaging foreign vessels loading grain bound for world markets. Earlier, another strike hit a vessel carrying Ukraine’s prized sunflower oil, triggering an environmental disaster along the Odesa coastline - one of many such incidents nationwide since Ukraine was invaded nearly four years ago (capping a week in which Kyiv was also pummelled by Russian drones and missiles - at the onset of a prolonged and dangerous cold snap).
This is World Port Odesa, a critical artery in the global food supply chain. The ships targeted here feed countries already on the brink of hunger across Africa and beyond. Yet unlike the Red Sea crisis, this slow-motion assault barely registers in Western capitals. If even a fraction of that diplomatic and military attention had been applied here that was deployed to the Red Sea, the global food picture might look very different today.
From there, the briefing widens: to Venezuela, where a familiar sales pitch is being dusted off by Donald Trump to lure oil executives back into an economy still viewed as fundamentally un-investable. And to Iran, where protests are entering a second week, fueled by economic pain but shadowed by unanswered questions about what - or who - could follow.
This analysis - filmed on location and connecting dots others miss - is exclusive to paid subscribers of World Briefing Plus.
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