Russia-Ukraine War Live Updates: Moskva Warship Has Sunk, Moscow Says – The New York Times

Although analysts said the loss of the ship would not alter the course of the war, an attack by the Neptune missile systems, if confirmed, would be a significant sign of Ukraine’s military capability and could serve as a deterrent to Russian naval attacks. It would also be the first successful Ukrainian attack on a major Russian warship at sea rather than at port.

The development comes as European officials are drafting the most contested measure yet to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, an embargo on Russian oil products — a move long resisted because of its enormous costs for Germany and its potential to disrupt politics around the region and increase energy prices.

The growing consensus around a step previously seen as politically untenable underscores the extent to which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has unified the world’s biggest trading bloc against Russian aggression. It would need to be approved by the European Union’s 27 member countries to go into effect.

Europe is highly dependent on Russian energy supplies, and in the past the E.U has equivocated over such a drastic move because of fears of economic turmoil that could follow. There is also worry over President Vladimir V. Putin’s longstanding tactic of wielding Russian energy as a geopolitical weapon.

Here are other major developments:

• The director of the C.I.A. said that Vladimir V. Putin’s “potential desperation” to extract the semblance of a victory in Ukraine might tempt him to order the use of a tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon, publicly discussing for the first time a concern that has coursed through the White House during the seven weeks of conflict.

• Senator Steve Daines of Montana and Representative Victoria Spartz of Indiana traveled to Kyiv and sites of rights abuses in the city’s suburbs, becoming the first American officials to turn up since the start of the war. The United States is also considering whether to send a high-level official to Kyiv in the coming days.

• Russia is continuing to target southern Ukraine, where it hopes to complete a “land bridge” to connect Crimea to its forces in the east. The main remaining obstacle to that goal is the besieged southern city of Mariupol.

• Dmitri A. Medvedev, Russia’s former prime minister, said Moscow would be forced to “seriously strengthen” its defenses in the Baltics if Finland and Sweden joined NATO, as the two countries are considering.

• Moscow said on Thursday that Ukrainian helicopters had launched strikes against a Russian town near the Ukrainian border, the latest in a series of reported attacks that has prompted Russian threats of retaliation.

• Ukrainian officials say that departing Russian soldiers have laced large swaths of the country with buried land mines and jury-rigged bombs.

In announcing the move, which would freeze assets estimated to be worth up to £10 billion, or roughly $13 million, the U.K. government said it amounted to “the largest asset freeze action in U.K. history.”

“We are tightening the ratchet on Putin’s war machine and targeting the circle of people closest to the Kremlin,” said Liz Truss, Britain’s foreign secretary. “We will keep going with sanctions until Putin fails in Ukraine. Nothing and no one is off the table.”

The new measures also include a travel ban on Mr. Davidovich.

Mr. Tenenbaum is listed as a director on Chelsea Football Club’s website. The British announcement states that Mr. Tenenbaum took control of Ervington Investments Ltd., an investment company tied to Mr. Abramovich, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Mr. Davidovich then took over the company from Mr. Tenenbaum in March, according to the announcement.

The club declined to comment on the new sanctions.

European countries have been stepping up sanctions against Russia in recent days, and are also considering a larger ban on Russian oil imports, a step they have been reluctant to take because of the potential for a wider impact on the global economy.

Earlier in the week, authorities in Jersey, a British territory, froze $7 billion in assets believed to be tied to Mr. Abramovich.

The French government published a list this week of dozens of properties, many of them on the French Riviera, that it said it would be freezing as part of its sanctions on Russia. While the owners of the assets can still access the properties, they are forbidden to sell or rent them.

In Germany, authorities recently announced the seizure of the superyacht Dilbar after determining that it was tied to Alisher Usmanov, a Russian oligarch, according to The Associated Press. The United States previously targeted Mr. Usmanov in a batch of sanctions announced last month that designated the superyacht as blocked property, estimating its value to be between $600 and $735 million and noting that it was one of the world’s biggest superyachts, outfitted with two helipads and an indoor pool.

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.

“Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” Mr. Burns said. “We don’t.”

Mr. Burns’s comments came in response to a question from retired Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, after a speech Mr. Burns delivered at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Both President Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, have acknowledged that the White House has been debating sending a high-level official to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, in a show of support for the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain recently took a secret trip into the capital by train.

Mr. Sullivan said that the White House had briefly considered having Mr. Biden go to Ukraine, but as soon as it became clear “what kind of footprint that would require, what kind of assets that would take from the Ukrainians as well as the U.S.” to keep the president safe, the idea was rejected.

When pressed about reports that Mr. Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin might go to Kyiv, Mr. Sullivan declined to discuss it. Mr. Biden told reporters no decision had been made to send an envoy.

Mr. Sullivan also said that in coming days the United States would announce a crackdown on countries and companies violating Western sanctions imposed on Moscow since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in late February.

Moody’s said that Russia still has until May 4, when the grace period ends, to make the payments in dollars and avoid a default on two bonds that are maturing in 2022 and 2042. The payment terms of the original bond contracts required dollars and did not include a provision to allow for another currency.

“Moody’s view is that investors did not obtain the foreign-currency contractual promise on the payment due date,” the ratings agency said.

Earlier this week, S&P Global placed Russia under a “selective default” rating after the Russian government said last week that it had repaid about $650 million of dollar-denominated debt in rubles.

Russia has said that any default would be “artificial” because its foreign-currency reserves have been immobilized by the sanctions and argued that payments in rubles should be a suitable alternative.

“As we have said many times, the most urgent problem here is the disruption of export logistics,” he said.

The European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc, has long resisted a ban on Russian oil because of its huge costs for European economies, in particular Germany’s, and its potential to jolt European politics and increase energy prices.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spurred a growing consensus among the bloc’s officials and ambassadors that Europe should no longer be financing the Kremlin through energy purchases and that it should reduce dependence on Russian energy by expanding alternative sources of supply.

A defiant Mr. Putin told Russian officials that the attempt by western countries to replace Russian energy sources would reverberate in the global economy and could be “extremely painful” for those seeking to sideline Russian suppliers.

Moreover, he said, there is a dearth of available natural gas on the global market. He predicted that Europe’s turn to energy deliveries from other countries, in particular the United States, would undermine European living standards and competitiveness and result in higher energy costs for consumers.

“There is no reasonable alternative to Russian gas in Europe,” he said.

While it is possible for countries in Western Europe to find alternative energy supplies, Mr. Putin said, it would take time.

Rising gasoline prices, driven in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have led President Biden to embrace oil, though he came into office on a promise to tackle the planet’s climate crisis.

On Tuesday, Mr. Biden traveled to Iowa to announce that the Environmental Protection Agency would temporarily lift regulations prohibiting the summertime use of an ethanol-gasoline blend that contributes to smog during the warmer months. Mr. Biden said his administration was going to waive the regulation to lower the price of gasoline for many Americans.

Alluding to such moves, Mr. Putin observed that Western countries appeared to be increasingly ready to abandon their green agendas and to continue their reliance on fossil fuels with a high carbon footprint. He suggested that Russia was being used as a pretext for the United States and its allies to roll back policies aimed at encouraging green energy that had proven to have a high economic cost.

“Now they have a wonderful excuse to cover up their own miscalculations and blame everything on Russia,” he said.

But he said that the fire aboard the Russian ship was continuing and remained “extensive.” And while Moscow has denied the ship was struck by a missile, the U.S. official said that several of Russia’s other ships that were in the Black Sea had now moved farther away from the Ukrainian coast.

Analysts said that such a move would likely display nerves from Russian captains lest their own ships come under fire.

When the first photos and videos of the slaughter in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb, began emerging on April 3, Russian propagandists quickly responded by saying that the bodies in the streets were those of actors.

“They call this evidence,” said a news host on Channel One. “This is yet another fake. The footage is staged.”

On Telegram, an app with broadcasting capabilities, channels devoted to supposed “fakes” pump out the same message, falsely claiming, for example, that a closer look at a video of bodies strewn across Yablonska Street in Bucha shows one of the corpses raising an arm and another one standing up.

One of the most popular news programs in the country, “60 Minutes” on the channel Russia-1, uses the English word fake liberally, stamping it on screenshots of articles published by the Western news media and on videos and photos from Ukraine.

“There is no evidence of victims, but the West doesn’t need the truth,” the show’s host, Olga Skabeyeva, declared in one episode. As she spoke, huge screens in the studio behind her projected a video showing corpses in Bucha, with “fake” written in red in one corner.

On Channel One, an entire program devoted to exposing “fakes” is hosted by Alexander Smol, who also hosts the Russian equivalent of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

In each episode of “AntiFake,” Mr. Smol convenes three experts in history, military tactics, social media or data — usually men — to pick over the details of social media posts or articles about the war in Ukraine published in Western publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC and The Associated Press.

Mr. Smol and his guests have argued that the scenes in Bucha must have been staged. There is not enough blood, they say. The bodies are positioned in different ways in photos, they claim.

They have not limited their campaign to Bucha.

In a recent episode, Mr. Smol broadcast a video of doctors trying unsuccessfully to revive a 6-year-old girl who was rushed to a hospital in Mariupol after a catastrophic shelling. The video was first released in late February by The A.P. and circulated on Ukrainian television and Western news media sites.

As the video of the dying girl was played over and over — the word “fake” stamped across it — the men on Mr. Smol’s show said it had been shot from too many angles and in too smooth a manner to be real. And they said a camera operator would not be allowed into an emergency room.

Mr. Smol and others on his program have also echoed the state narrative that Ukrainian forces were behind the attacks on the hospital complex in Mariupol — a strike that killed a pregnant woman and wounded staff and maternity ward patients — and the train station in Kramatorsk, which left at least 50 people dead.

And if it were a Ukrainian cruise missile that hit the ship, as seems credible, that displays almost more incompetence and carelessness, given that the Moskva was equipped with a sophisticated, three-layer defense against a missile strike.

However it happened, so much damage to such an important ship is a deep embarrassment to the Russian Navy and will do much to boost Ukrainian morale as a bigger fight looms in the Donbas. It will also make it harder for Russia to resupply its forces from the sea or to provide artillery cover for them, the official said.

Located on the Sea of Azov between the Russian-held Donbas region in the east and Crimea in the south, Mariupol is strategically important for the next phase of the war. If the city falls under Russian control, it would help Russia in its military aim of linking those regions as it continues to mass forces for a large-scale assault.

Russian and Ukrainian officials on Wednesday confirmed that Russia’s forces had taken the Ilyich metal plant, in the northern part of Mariupol, after making significant advances in the center of the city in recent days.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said that more than 1,000 Ukrainian marines in the 36th brigade had “voluntarily put the weapons and surrendered” at the plant, in a video statement on Wednesday. Earlier in the week, marines from the 36th brigade had warned that they were likely approaching their “last battle” as they were running low on ammunition.

Ukrainian officials conceded Wednesday that some forces had laid down their weapons after Russian troops encircled one of Ukraine’s remaining strongholds in the city but they denied reports of a mass surrender.

“One thousand people is a lie,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said in a televised interview on Wednesday.

He said that some troops had come under “artillery and airstrikes” resulting in many “lost and taken prisoner.” But he said others had managed to escape and had joined forces with Ukrainian troops holding the Azovstal steel plant farther south, nearer to the coast.

The battle for Mariupol started in early March, and Russian bombardments have left bodies strewn about city streets and have unleashed a horrific humanitarian crisis for those who remain.

The city’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, has estimated that tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, though officials say it has been impossible do an accurate count of civilian casualties or to survey the full extent of the destruction. On Wednesday, the mayor said that 120,000 people were left in the city, surviving with power outages and limited access to food and water.

Mariupol’s City Council said in a statement on Wednesday that Russian forces continue to “purposefully create a humanitarian catastrophe” by intentionally attacking civilian infrastructure and prohibiting humanitarian aid to reach the city.

“Even residents using their private transport are barred from leaving for the second day in a row,” the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said Tuesday on Telegram.

But E.U. officials and diplomats say the union is now moving toward adopting a phased-in ban designed to give Germany and other countries time to arrange alternative suppliers. The union took a similar approach earlier this month when it banned Russian coal, providing for a four-month transition period.

The oil embargo would not be put up for negotiation among the E.U. member states until after the final round of the French elections, on April 24, to ensure that the impact on gas prices does not help the right-wing populist candidate Marine Le Pen and hurt president Emmanuel Macron’s chances of re-election, officials said.

The timeline is as important as the details of the ban, and is indicative of the brinkmanship required to convince all 27 E.U. countries to agree to take the previously unthinkable step, as Russia prepares its renewed offensive in eastern Ukraine.

But officials and diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter with the news media, said there was a growing sense that the measure would be taken even in the absence of more revelations like the atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine.

“The Commission and E.U. members have smartly shied away from defining red lines that would trigger a sanctions response since Russia attacked Ukraine,” said Emre Peker, a director at the Eurasia Group consultancy.

“I expect the E.U. will shy away from defining triggers,” he added, “as continued escalation by Russia in eastern Ukraine and revelations from Bucha and elsewhere continue to drive momentum behind a hardening European stance. Any other major catastrophes that unfold will just add more impetus to the E.U. response.”

The European Union, which has taken five rounds of increasingly severe financial sanctions against Russia since the invasion began Feb. 24, is under tremendous pressure by allies to stop lining the Kremlin’s coffers through oil purchases. So far they have kept gas imports from Russia off the table, because they remain too critical to important European economies, Germany’s in particular.

The latest reported incident occurred in Klimovo, a sleepy Russian town about six miles northwest of the Ukrainian border, the Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement. Two low-flying Ukrainian helicopters fired on least six residential buildings, injuring seven people, the statement said.

Over the past week, Russia has repeatedly accused Ukraine of conducting attacks and preparing acts of sabotage on Russian soil. On Wednesday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that if the attacks continue, it would retaliate by striking Ukrainian command points, including in Kyiv.

In recent weeks, Russian officials have also accused Ukraine of attacking a border village in the Belgorod region, an airstrike against a major fuel depot in the region and the bombardment of a railway bridge leading to Ukraine.

It was important, he said, for American elected officials to show solidarity.

Mr. Daines and Ms. Spartz, both Republicans, were invited by the Ukrainian government, with just over a day’s notice. Mr. Daines had broken off from a visit to Eastern Europe to make the trip. Ms. Spartz, who last year became the first Ukrainian-born lawmaker to serve in Congress, had planned an unofficial visit to Ukraine and later joined Mr. Daines for the trip supported by the Ukrainian government.

Once in Kyiv, where they arrived by train from western Ukraine, the pair traveled by car escorted by the police on a route through stark scenes of destruction, blown-up Russian tanks and rubble, where rescuers were still searching for bodies. The two also observed an exhumation from a communal grave in Bucha, a town northwest of Kyiv where hundreds of bodies were found on the streets after Russian forces retreated.

The horror in Bucha — where some victims’ hands were bound and some had been shot in the head, in a sign of extrajudicial killings — has become emblematic of the war’s toll and a new touchstone of rights abuse in wartime in Europe. Several European delegations have also visited the site.

The two Republican lawmakers arrived as the Biden administration is considering sending a high-level official to Kyiv in the days ahead as a sign of support, according to a person familiar with the internal discussions.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have both made high-profile visits over the past month to countries neighboring Ukraine, and other top American officials have made similar visits, some coming close to the border. But no American official had publicly visited Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion in late February, and the United States has evacuated all diplomats.

Both Mr. Daines and Ms. Spartz said they were urging the United States to return diplomats to Ukraine as some European states have done now that Kyiv, the capital, is no longer under imminent threat of attack by Russia.

“I hope that our visit will encourage more American officials and leaders to come, to stand with the people of Ukraine,” Mr. Daines said, while Ms. Spartz said it was “important to show our support, to show we care.”

Standing in the rubble of the collapsed building, where Ukrainian officials have said that at least 21 people died, Mr. Daines found a child’s toy — a wooden car — and looked into apartments that had been peeled open by the explosion, revealing kitchen cabinets still hanging on a wall.

In Bucha, the two watched the Ukrainian authorities remove three bodies from the tan clay soil of a churchyard where a communal grave was being excavated.

Mr. Daines described what he had seen as “indisputable evidence of war crimes.”

“It’s everywhere,” he said. “We’ve been driving for miles and miles and miles, seeing death and destruction caused by Vladimir Putin in this evil invasion.”

Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, said he had arranged the visit in the hope that more American lawmakers would follow, get a first-hand sense of the stakes in the war, and vote to provide additional weapons to Ukraine.

Both Ms. Spartz and Mr. Daines said they supported bipartisan efforts in Congress to spur the Biden administration to deliver weapons to the Ukrainian Army more swiftly.

“I think we should be providing the lethal aid that they need to win this war,” Mr. Daines said. “The humanitarian crisis will not end until the war ends. And the war will not end until the Ukrainians win.”

The governor of the Odesa region along the Black Sea, Maxim Marchenko, said on Telegram that the country’s forces had struck the ship with anti-ship Neptune missiles. The senior Ukrainian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe an active military engagement, said that it was the first time the Ukrainian-developed Neptune missile had been used in the war.

There was no independent visual confirmation of the vessel’s status, and the statement about the Neptune could not be independently verified.

Whatever the cause of the ship’s possible demise, it was a potent symbolic victory for the Ukrainian military, an embarrassment for Moscow and — if a Neptune was used — a demonstration of the power that new weapons could have in shaping the war. It would be the first successful Ukrainian attack on a major Russian warship at sea rather than at port.

Ships from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet have been offshore since the start of the war, periodically launching rocket or missile attacks against targets inside Ukraine. The fleet has cut off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea, removing a key economic lifeline.

The potential loss of the Moskva provides a morale boost to Ukrainian forces, but it is unlikely to change the course of the war. Russian forces are on the verge of taking the strategic port city of Mariupol, which would pave the way for the creation of a “land bridge” between Russian territory and the occupied Crimean Peninsula.

The Moskva, with a crew of almost 700, is the pride of the Russian naval fleet in the Black Sea. It was originally built in the Soviet era in the Ukrainian port of Mykolaiv — the city where Ukrainian forces last month mounted a spirited defense that stopped the Russian advance toward Odesa.

The Ukrainians have long had the ability to strike Russian ships parked near their territorial waters, but the Neptune gives the nation’s territorial defense forces far greater range. The missile, which is based on the Soviet AS-20 “Kayak” anti-ship missile and is similar to the U.S.-built Harpoon missile, can reach targets as far as 200 miles offshore.

As the Russian Navy positioned its fleet in menacing fashion on the Black Sea in the weeks before the war, Ukraine raced to prepare defenses and its military described the Neptune as a vital weapon being added to its arsenal.

It is unclear how many Neptune missiles Ukraine’s Navy has. But if it was a Neptune that hit the Moskva, it would be a demonstration of the weapon’s effectiveness. The Ukrainians have called on the West to deliver sophisticated anti-ship weapons since the war began.

The Pentagon estimates that the Russian Navy has “a couple of dozen ships” in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and Ukraine has had a hard time countering Russia’s naval dominance.

In March, Ukraine’s military said it had destroyed a Russian ship at the southern Ukrainian port of Berdiansk, which is under Russian occupation, and videos and photos reviewed by The New York Times confirmed at the time that a Russian ship was on fire at the port.

Lt. Cmdr. Jason Lancaster, a U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, said the threat posed by missiles like the Neptune “changes operational behavior” of an opponent.

Writing for the Center for International Maritime Security this month, he said that “these behavioral changes limit Russia’s ability to utilize their fleet to their advantage,” and that “the added stress of sudden combat increases fatigue and can lead to mistakes.”

The flagship vessel entered service in the early 1980s, was renamed the Moskva in 1996 and was partially refitted in 2020, according to the Russian news media. It was an integral part of the Russian advance in this war.

It was also the vessel that Ukrainian troops famously told off as it approached a Ukrainian garrison on Snake Island on the Black Sea.

According to an audio exchange made public in late February, a Russian officer told the Ukrainians to surrender. “This is a Russian military warship,” the officer said. “I suggest you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and needless casualties. Otherwise, you will be bombed.”

A Ukrainian soldier offered a simple, if obscene, refusal, using words that have become a rallying cry around Ukraine.

In early March, days after Russia invaded Ukraine and began cracking down on dissent at home, Konstantin Siniushin, a venture capitalist in Riga, Latvia, helped charter two planes out of Russia to help people flee.

Both planes departed from Moscow, carrying tech workers from the Russian capital as well as St. Petersburg, Perm, Ekaterinburg and other cities. Together, the planes moved about 300 software developers, entrepreneurs and other technology specialists out of the country, including 30 Russian workers from start-ups backed by Mr. Siniushin.

Thousands of other Russian tech workers fled to Armenia in the weeks after the invasion. Thousands more flew to Georgia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and other countries that accept Russian citizens without visas.

By March 22, a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow. They are part of a much larger exodus of workers from Russia, but their departure could have an even more lasting impact on the country’s economy.

The exodus will fundamentally change the Russian tech industry, according to interviews with more than two dozen people who are part of the tightknit community of Russian tech workers around the world, including many who left the country in recent weeks. An industry once seen as a rising force in the Russian economy is losing vast swaths of its workers. It is losing many of the bright young minds building companies for the future.

“Most Russian tech workers are part of the global market. Either they work for global companies or they are tech entrepreneurs trying to build new companies for the global market,” Mr. Siniushin said through an interpreter from his office in Riga. “So they are leaving the country.”

The recent exodus reverses 10 to 15 years of momentum in the Russian tech industry, said Konstantin Sonin, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, who immigrated from Russia to the United States. “It is now like the ‘90s, when whomever was able to move moved out of the country,” he said.

Tech is a small part of the Russian economy compared with the energy and metals industries, but it has been growing rapidly. The loss of many young, educated, forward-looking people could have economic ramifications for years to come, economists said.

In its first official report on the war’s impact, the U.N. said the war in Ukraine was having “alarming cascading effects” on a global economy already “battered” by the pandemic and climate change.

The report said that up to 1.7 billion people — a third of whom are already living in poverty — now face food, energy and finance disruptions. With energy prices rising as much as 50 percent for natural gas in recent months, and with inflation growing and development stalled, many countries risk defaulting on their debts, according to the report.

“These are countries where people struggle to afford healthy diets, where imports are essential to satisfy the food and energy needs of their populations, where debt burdens and tightening resources limit government’s ability to cope with the vagaries of global financial conditions,” the report said.

It said that 107 countries had severe exposure to at least one the three dimensions of the crisis, and that of those nations, 69 had severe exposure to all three dimensions.

Ukraine and Russia provide about 30 percent of the world’s wheat and barley, according to the report.

The war has sent commodity prices to record highs — with food prices 34 percent higher than this time last year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and crude oil prices up by around 60 percent.

“Vulnerable populations in developing countries are particularly exposed to these price swings,” the report said, adding that “the rise in food prices threatens knock-on effects of social unrest.”

But the report said that swift action, coupled with political will and existing resources, could soften the blow — recommending that countries not hoard food supplies, and that they offer help to small farmers, keep freight costs stable and lift restrictions on exports, among other things.

The report called on governments to make strategic fuel reserves available to the global market and reduce the use of wheat for fuel.