Worth paying attention to, though I'm not sure either the characterization or the purported causation is correct.
From the International Institute for Strategic Studies, August 14:
Russia’s harvest for 2025 is shaping up to be the worst in over 17 years. This is likely to expose weaknesses in Russia’s wartime economy and its status as a global power.
Russia’s ability to export grain and fertiliser has remained one of its few sources of economic strength and international leverage since its invasion of Ukraine. Unlike hydrocarbons, these exports have been spared Western sanctions, providing the Kremlin with critical revenue and soft power reach. But an increasingly erratic climate is now threatening this advantage. Russia’s bad 2025 harvest is more than a weather event: it reveals the structural fragility of Russia’s war economy and the growing risks to a system built on fiscal buffers and fossil fuels.
Strength in decline
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union could not feed itself. It depended on grain imports, primarily from the United States. This gave Washington a lever of geopolitical influence during the era of detente by offering access to food on the condition of restraint in foreign policy.
A Soviet weakness became a Russian strength. The post-Soviet transition to private land ownership and heavy state investment transformed Russia into an agricultural powerhouse. This gave it the confidence to ban Western food imports in 2014 in retaliation against sanctions imposed after Russia annexed Crimea and parts of Donbas. By 2016, Russia had become the world’s largest exporter of wheat and a leading exporter of fertiliser. These exports brought not just foreign currency, but influence – especially among buyers in Africa and the Middle East.
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western sanctions have sought to isolate the Russian economy. These have largely exempted agricultural exports to protect global food security, particularly in developing countries. For the Kremlin, this omission has become a secure stream of foreign earnings and influence that have helped stabilise the economy and support the war effort. But nature, indifferent to political constraints, may now be doing what Western policymakers have declined to do.
The 2025 harvest is shaping up to be Russia’s worst in years. July saw the country’s lowest grain exports for that month since 2008. This is a result of intensifying climate volatility. Unseasonable spring frosts damaged over 240,000 hectares of crops, with 100,000 hectares lost outright. These were followed by record summer heat, with temperatures above 40°C in key southern regions. Drought conditions this summer have been devastating, with nearly 500,000 hectares destroyed. The authorities in Rostov oblast, a major grain-producing region, declared a state of emergency. Fields once golden with wheat were left parched and cracked. Wheat production forecasts were revised downward from 90 million tonnes to 82m–84m tonnes. Total grain output, which peaked at 158m tonnes in 2022, is now expected to fall to around 130m tonnes.
This comes as pressure mounts on Russia’s once primary source of foreign earnings: hydrocarbon exports. In July, the European Union and the United Kingdom lowered their price cap on Russian crude from US$60 to US$47 per barrel and escalated sanctions on Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers. US President Donald Trump’s second administration has imposed tariffs on some buyers of Russian oil – most notably India. Crude oil and refined petroleum products now account for less than half of Russia’s export revenues, placing growing importance on alternative sources, including agricultural exports.
Climate change and consequences
As I explore in The Earth Transformed, one of the defining challenges for modern states is how they manage and adapt to environmental stress: even modest shocks can have significant implications. Russia, vast and climatically diverse, is particularly exposed – as shown by events in 1916, when food shortages and price rises triggered uprisings, first in tsarist Central Asia and then in Petrograd.
Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin has long dismissed climate change, even suggesting that global warming might benefit Russia by rendering its northern lands arable. This wager appears increasingly short-sighted. While Western economies are investing heavily in adaptation and mitigation, Russia remains wedded to a carbon-intensive model of growth. As one of the world’s largest petrostates by area, it has effectively staked its future on the delay, or failure, of a post-carbon transition....
....MUCH MORE
Possibly also of interest, September 2021 - That Time The CIA Completely Missed A Soviet Crop Failure And Allowed The Sovs To Buy American Wheat On The Cheap
Over the years I've mentioned some of the major failings of the U.S. intelligence community, from the failure to foresee the rapidity of the collapse of the communist governments in Eastern Europe to the round-up, torture, and murder of virtually all the human assets the CIA was running in China.
And the Chinese hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management starting in 2013, exposing the personal information of 20 million current and former employees, including those with highest level security clearances. That was actually a joint CIA/FBI failure. As was the Soviet development of the H-bomb.
And....well, it is a very long list.
Here's one more instance. the memory of which was triggered by wheat trading decisively over $8.00 this morning (821-2 +18-2)....
*****
....Not only did the Americans supply the wheat the Soviets desperately needed but they paid the grain companies a $300 million subsidy and extended $750 million in credit for the purchases.
And because the Kremlin was able to keep the magnitude of the disaster from becoming common knowledge they were able to make the purchases in a market that did not have access to all the relevant information needed to establish a clearing price.
Next up, the St. Louis Fed paper referenced above....
