MOSCOW (Reuters) -Moscow said on Wednesday that about 3% of Russia’s total grain harvest will come from its “new territories” in Ukraine this year, the same as last year’s figure despite a drought there and in adjoining regions during the summer.
Russian Agriculture Minister Oksana Lut said the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which Russia largely controls, harvested about 4 million tons of grain, slightly less than in 2024, and 600,000 tons of oilseeds from about 3 million hectares of land.
Russia refers to the four regions as “new territories”; they are still internationally recognised as Ukrainian.
Ukraine considers all grain produced in the four regions and Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, to have been stolen by Moscow, and regularly asks its Western allies to sanction importers of it.
Lut said the state subsidies for farmers in the regions had increased by 70% in 2025 – Russia’s third full year of control. Russia expects to harvest 135 million tons of grain in total this year.
Speaking in parliament, Lut said that since the start of the military campaign in Ukraine in 2022, Russia had cleared mines from about 200,000 hectares of land in the regions, increasing the bank of arable land. She said that mine clearing was ongoing.
(Reporting by Gleb Bryanski; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
