When Russian forces crossed into Ukraine just over four years ago, the world awoke to the largest interstate war in Europe since 1945. But while the frontlines were in Donbas and Kherson, the shockwaves of that invasion radiated far beyond Europe’s borders. In a matter of weeks, the conflict destabilised global energy markets, ruptured trade in grain and fertiliser, and unsettled diplomatic alignments that had long anchored relations between the Global North and the Global South.

Few regions felt the aftershocks more than the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), where tens of millions of people depend on food and fuel imports tied to the Black Sea region. The Ukraine war thus revealed that globalization’s arteries-shipping corridors, commodity exchanges, and supply chains-could become instruments of coercion in wartime as surely as tanks or missiles.

Year One: A Crisis in Global Economics

Before the war, Ukraine’s contribution to global food supply was immense. Its fertile chernozem soil produced roughly 10 percent of the wheat, 15 percent of the corn, and nearly 50 percent of the sunflower oil traded internationally. Combined with Russia, the two countries accounted for almost one-third of world wheat exports. Nearly all of Ukraine’s agricultural exports left through the Black Sea ports of Odesa, Chornomorsk, and Yuzhny. When Russia’s navy blockaded those ports in March 2022, global grain flows abruptly collapsed, and the UN’s Food Price Index jumped 12.6 percent in a single month, reaching its highest level since records began in 1990.

To stabilise markets, the United Nations and Turkey brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative in July 2022. It established a protected maritime corridor for grain shipments from three Ukrainian ports to global destinations. By its first anniversary, nearly 33 million tonnes of food had sailed. The World Food Programme alone shipped 725,000 tonnes of wheat to hunger-stricken populations in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. 

The deal helped calm prices, yet its fragility was obvious. When Moscow suspended participation in July 2023, the expected price for wheat on the Chicago Board of Trade spiked sharply. A few days later, Russian missiles struck Odesa’s port facilities, destroying grain silos built partly with EU funds.

For the MENA region—home to roughly 6 percent of the world’s population but consuming over 20 percent of its wheat imports—the shock was immediate. The IMF warned that the war could push 29 million people in the region into poverty. For low-income states already strained by COVID-19 debt, the grain shock was a terrible blow. As cargoes stalled, prices for bread and flour surged across Arab markets.

Egypt, the world’s largest wheat buyer, sourced nearly 80 percent of its supply from Russia and Ukraine; its import bill ballooned by $5 billion in a single fiscal year, and the cost of unsubsidised baladi bread doubled within two months. Lebanon, meanwhile, had relied on Ukraine for roughly half its imported wheat, a lifeline made fragile after the 2020 Beirut port explosion destroyed its main grain silos. In Tunisia  and Libya, bakers warned of rationing; in Yemen—already suffering one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises—the UN World Food Programme announced cuts to rations for 13 million people.

These disruptions quickly morphed from an economic to a political emergency. In Egypt, bread subsidies are not merely social policy—they are a cornerstone of regime legitimacy. The state spends billions annually to ensure a five-piaster loaf, and any increase risks unrest reminiscent of the 1977 ‘bread riots’. Faced with spiralling import costs and dwindling reserves, Egypt accelerated domestic wheat procurement, mixing local grain into imported stocks while seeking loans from Gulf allies. Tunisia, constrained by debt and reliant on international lenders, struggled even to pay foreign suppliers, leading to sporadic shortages that fuelled public anger. 

Climate stress also compounded the crisis: drought reduced harvests in Iraq and Syria, while water scarcity drove up irrigation costs in Jordan and Morocco. The Ukraine war did not create these vulnerabilities, but it amplified them, revealing how climate, conflict, and commerce now intertwine. For governments across North Africa, the spectre of 2011 hung over every bread line.

By the end of 2023, grain shipments had partially resumed through alternative routes. Ukraine established a ‘humanitarian corridor’ along the western Black Sea, hugging the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria. Smaller volumes travelled by rail and barge via the Danube and Poland under the EU’s “solidarity lanes” initiative. Yet, logistics costs remained 50–60 percent higher than pre-war averages. For import-dependent nations across MENA and Africa, these higher transport premiums meant enduring inflation even when harvest volumes recovered.

The episode drove home a structural lesson: interdependence without redundancy is fragility. For decades, the efficiency of global trade masked its lack of resilience. Ukraine’s blockade revealed that a single chokepoint—the Black Sea—could jeopardise food access for half a billion people. The Global South’s experience of the war, therefore, has not been limited to watching Europe’s tragedy from afar; it has been a lived crisis of hunger, inflation, and diplomatic recalibration.

Years Two through Four: Global South States Find Leverage

While the first year of the war exposed the vulnerabilities of food-importing economies, its second year revealed a deeper political shift: a redistribution of diplomatic agency toward the Global South, particularly the Middle East. The region’s governments, once passive spectators of great-power rivalry, emerged as mediators, financiers, and beneficiaries in a crisis that unsettled the old hierarchies of global power.

Among the clearest examples was the Gulf. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar exploited the turmoil to reinforce their credentials as indispensable partners for both the West and the East. Their economic windfalls were immense—Saudi Arabia’s GDP expanded by 8.7 percent in 2022, the fastest among G20 members, driven by soaring oil revenues and robust non-oil sector growth. Their response to the war was shaped less by loyalty to Washington than by pragmatic calculations. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi refused to isolate Russia within OPEC+, calculating that price stability outweighed Western pressure for more output. In doing so, they implicitly asserted a post-American energy order, one where Gulf producers coordinate with Moscow as equals rather than subordinates.

The war thus accelerated a trend that had been underway for a decade: the emergence of the Gulf as a self-confident geopolitical hub straddling multiple alliances. The UAE maintained open financial channels with Russian entities even as Western sanctions tightened. Dubai’s real-estate and banking sectors absorbed billions in Russian capital in 2023, a flow that Western diplomats privately conceded they could not halt. 

Simultaneously, Abu Dhabi hosted Ukrainian delegations for ceasefire discussions, positioning itself as a neutral broker. Saudi Arabia went further, convening the Jeddah peace summit in August 2023, which gathered forty nations, including China, India, and Brazil, to discuss President Zelenskyy’s ten-point peace plan. Although no breakthrough emerged, the symbolism was unmistakable: a non-Western capital had become the venue for global diplomacy over a European war. 

Turkey’s diplomacy was equally pivotal. Balancing its NATO obligations with economic dependence on Russia, Ankara used the crisis to amplify its strategic indispensability. The Black Sea Grain Initiative owed its existence to Turkish mediation, and when it collapsed in 2023, President Erdoğan immediately proposed an alternative corridor via Turkish waters. Turkey also secured discounted Russian gas and advanced plans for a regional energy hub near Thrace. These arrangements underscored a new transactional diplomacy: Ankara could oppose Russia in one theatre and cooperate in another without suffering strategic penalty.

Beyond statecraft, the war knit together Middle Eastern and Eurasian military-industrial complexes in ways unseen since the Cold War. Russia’s increasing reliance on Iranian-manufactured Shahed-series drones to bombard Ukrainian infrastructure marked the first major use of Middle Eastern weapons in a European conflict. The arrangement reportedly involved technology transfers from Moscow to Tehran, including Su-35 fighter jets and advanced radar systems. For Iran, the alliance broke isolation and validated its drone program; for Russia, it offset sanctions-related shortages in precision weapons. The fallout reverberated across the Gulf, alarming Israel and the United States while emboldening Tehran’s regional posture.

Israel, meanwhile, navigated a delicate equilibrium. While publicly condemning Russia’s aggression, it avoided direct arms transfers to Ukraine to preserve freedom of action against Iranian forces in Syria. Reports nonetheless surfaced of Israeli intelligence sharing on Iranian drone operations and limited supply of defensive technology through third-party channels. The balancing act reflected Jerusalem’s calculation that the war’s outcome mattered less than maintaining deconfliction with Moscow in the Levant.

The conflict also reshaped global arms markets. Russia’s preoccupation in Ukraine curtailed deliveries to its long-standing clients in Africa and the Middle East. In the 2017–2021 period, Russia accounted for roughly 44 percent of African arms imports; by 2019–2023, that share had declined to approximately 24 percent. Filling the vacuum, Türkiye expanded exports of Bayraktar TB2 drones to some 30 countries, including Ethiopia and Morocco. China likewise increased sales of armed UAVs and air-defence systems to the Gulf. The redistribution of arms supply reflected a broader diversification: states of the Global South no longer depend on a single great-power patron for military technology.

At the diplomatic level, the crisis accelerated the erosion of Western monopoly over norm-setting. The expansion of BRICS in 2024 to include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE symbolised a realignment long in the making. These states view participation in BRICS not as anti-Western defiance but as insurance against over-reliance on a single economic bloc. The Ukraine war, by weaponising finance and sanctions, convinced much of the Global South that diversification of reserves, payment systems, and logistics is a matter of sovereignty. Discussions about trading oil in non-dollar currencies-once taboo-have entered mainstream Gulf discourse.

Even multilateral humanitarianism adapted. The World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization began sourcing more grain from alternative producers, including Argentina and Australia, while pushing for regional stockpiles in North Africa and the Horn. Into this vacuum stepped regional development banks and sovereign wealth funds. 

The Saudi Public Investment Fund and the Qatar Investment Authority have jointly financed agritech projects in Egypt and Sudan; the Islamic Development Bank launched a food-security trust to stabilise prices through financing compliant with Islamic law. These mechanisms reflect an embryonic form of South-South solidarity grounded in capital rather than ideology. However, the underlying asymmetry remains: transport insurance, shipping finance, and commodity futures are still dominated by Western firms.

Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine have each courted the Global South through competing narratives. Moscow turned its southward pivot into a strategy: through food donations, energy deals, and security partnerships, Russia sought to demonstrate that sanctions isolation did not equate to global isolation. President Putin’s promise to deliver free grain to six African nations in 2023 was largely symbolic-barely one percent of previous export volumes-but politically potent. Continued cooperation with Egypt on the El Dabaa nuclear project signalled Moscow’s intent to remain embedded in MENA infrastructure. 

Ukraine, conversely, pursued moral diplomacy: the Grain from Ukraine programme shipped tens of thousands of tonnes of grain to famine-threatened regions, while Kyiv argued to African capitals that its struggle for sovereignty mirrors post-colonial liberation struggles. This framing resonates where historical memories of empire remain vivid, yet it remains challenged by      pragmatic calculations—many Global South governments prioritise immediate access to cheap fuel or fertilizer over normative solidarity.

For MENA importers, resilience cannot rely solely on market mechanisms; it demands political and infrastructural autonomy. By late 2024, the war had entrenched two opposing trends. On one side, Western economies deepened intra-alliance coordination, reinforcing NATO and the G7. On the other side, the Global South—including key Middle Eastern powers—expanded horizontal networks through BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and regional trade pacts. The Middle East now finds itself at the confluence of these systems, able to bargain between them. In that sense, the Ukraine war did not simply destabilise world order; it accelerated its pluralisation.

At a normative level, the war revived debates about the moral economy of sanctions and aid. Critics in the Global South argue that Western sanctions on Russia—though legally justified—produced disproportionate harm for developing economies by constraining payment systems and maritime insurance. Similarly, the surge of humanitarian funding to Ukraine contrasted sharply with declining contributions to protracted crises in Syria or Yemen. This asymmetry risks entrenching cynicism toward Western human-rights rhetoric and accelerating geopolitical diversification.

Building a Resilient Future

As the dust of war gradually settles, the region faces a new and compounding threat.

The US-Israeli war on Iran, launched in late February 2026, threatens to compound the food-security damage wrought by the Ukraine war in ways that are structurally distinct but equally severe. While the Black Sea crisis disrupted a breadbasket region, the Iran conflict strikes at the world’s fertiliser supply chain: up to thirty percent of globally traded fertiliser transits the Strait of Hormuz, and the near-closure of that waterway has already sent urea prices surging by more than a quarter. 

Gulf states—Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE—are among the world’s largest exporters of nitrogen-based fertilisers, and the disruption arrives at the worst possible moment, coinciding with the Northern Hemisphere’s spring planting season. The World Food Programme has warned that a prolonged conflict could push an additional 45 million people into acute hunger, with sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Gulf’s own import-dependent populations most at risk. 

For MENA states that had barely adapted to the grain shock of 2022, this new crisis underscores a painful truth: the region sits at the intersection of the world’s two most vulnerable chokepoints—the Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz—and its food security is hostage to conflicts it did not start.

Against this backdrop, three structural lessons stand out.

First, global food and energy markets can no longer be managed through ad hoc crisis diplomacy. The Black Sea Grain Initiative was a temporary success, but its suspension proved how humanitarian corridors require legal codification under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Institutionalising such corridors would prevent future blockades from weaponising hunger.

Second, resilience must replace efficiency as the organising principle of globalization. Import-dependent states in MENA and sub-Saharan Africa need regional grain reserves, diversified logistics, and investment in domestic production. The ASEAN Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserve offers a workable model for a potential framework in the Mediterranean.

Third, development finance should internalise the externalities of war: when a conflict in Europe triggers food inflation in Africa, compensatory mechanisms must operate automatically, not after months-long negotiations.

Policy recommendations flow logically from these insights. Governments in the Middle East should:

• Establish a Regional Food-Security Council under the Arab League, mandated to coordinate procurement and emergency stocks.
• Expand bilateral agricultural partnerships with African producers, ensuring that Gulf investments in farmland include technology transfer and environmental safeguards.
• Accelerate diversification of payment systems-developing local-currency settlement channels with Asian and African partners to reduce vulnerability to sanctions disruptions.
• Invest in maritime insurance and logistics capacity along the Red Sea and eastern Mediterranean to reduce freight premiums during crises.
• Collaborate with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the Islamic Development Bank to create a permanent ‘grain corridor guarantee fund’ that underwrites shipments from conflict zones.

For external partners—the EU, United States, and international financial institutions—the imperative is to treat food and energy security as integral to peacebuilding. Emergency grain shipments should be accompanied by debt-service relief for import-dependent countries. Climate adaptation finance must prioritise drought-resistant agriculture in the MENA region, where climate change and war-driven market shocks intersect. Finally, diplomatic engagement with the Global South should move beyond moral appeals to practical reciprocity: equitable vaccine distribution, transparent trade rules, and fair access to green technology.

The Ukraine war has rendered visible what economists long theorised, but policymakers ignored: that interdependence is a double-edged sword. It binds states together in prosperity but also in vulnerability. In an age of cascading crises-climate, conflict, and inequality, resilience will be the new currency of legitimacy. Whether in Kyiv or Khartoum, Odesa or Alexandria, the measure of global order will not be who dominates but who endures. The future stability of the international system may depend less on who wins the battles in the Donbas than on whether the world ensures that no child goes hungry because a port thousands of miles ceased to function.