Hacker News Reader

Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering the same - or perhaps biological weapons? It's obviously a cover story, their farmland and farmer needs didn't just all of a sudden lead to requiring the amount it exports.

View on HN

It's a common explosive. It's not a biological weapon - Wikipedia states that it has a similar median lethal dose to table salt[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate#Health_hazard...

The price of living in eastern europe is rising. Natural gas prices have rissen quite a bit where I live and it's disrupting the economy, prices of everything will rise in the upcoming months. I believe this is economical warfare.

Good point - or it's a double-whammy economic warfare + reserves for weapons manufacturing; ideally it's also them shooting themselves in the foot and some ally country is seeing the business opportunity, and security threat, and will ramp up production.

In smart, organized nations, they'll hopefully realize this and simply go into debt - ideally at the same rate as other allies who ideally share the burden, so no one is "getting behind" more than the other ally.

Yep, it's not explosives. Much better explosives can be made by nation states.

But nothing like having food prices go through the roof to destabilize society.

On a possibly related note, Ukraine is one of the largest wheat exporters in the world. A disruption in their planting and growing season could greatly impact food prices, expecially in the Middle East and Europe.

You can't call a situation when a country is keeping important fertilizers to itself an "economical warfare". There is no obligation at all for Russia to sell the maximum possible amount of fetilizers to Europe. It is even not in Russia's interests at all. Do you know of any such obligations?

Right and there are no other exogenous factors that could impact Russia's desire to export fertilizer, like an ongoing global pandemic wreaking havoc on supply chains. It must be biological weapons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com