The Potato Politics of Putin Exposes Economic Isolation in Russia and the Changing Nature of Conflict

When looking for evidence of a changing global order, consider the potato. Russia is currently experiencing record shortages of this widely consumed staple food.

The root of the insecurity is a dangerous combination of geopolitical upheaval, market volatility, and poor adaptation to climate change. In response, Putin’s potato politics with “friendly” and “unfriendly” nations demonstrates just how fast international norms have fallen away in recent years.

According to Rosstat, the Russian State Statistics Service, the year-on-year harvest of potatoes across the country fell by around 12 per cent in 2024. For consumers, the price of a potato has more than doubled since.

This matters in a country that consumes the fourth most potatoes in 2022 – and more per capita than all the countries above it on the list: China, India, and the United States.

The potato crisis has not gone unnoticed by the uppermost echelons of the Russian ruling elites.

In a public meeting in the white marbled Catherine Hall, deep inside the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin addressed the issue frankly.

Vladimir Putin:

"By the way, about potatoes… Yesterday, I repeat, I also met with representatives of various business areas… it turns out that we do not have enough potatoes."

The shortage boils down to three factors. The first is market volatility and poor infrastructure to deal with changing supply and demand.

A bumper harvest in 2023, where overstocked supermarket shelves caused prices to fall, prompted farmers to prioritise other more valuable vegetables the following year. But a lack of storage infrastructure and future planning, which could have maintained a stock of potatoes in a surplus year, meant that much of Russia’s reserve went to waste.

Climate change is another contributing factor. Prolonged droughts and sudden cold snaps across Russia’s fertile western states have chipped away at the harvest.

In the fertile black chernozem soils of Bryansk, 500,000 fewer tonnes of the vegetable were harvested last year. In Nizhny Novgorod, the shortfall was 120,000 tonnes, and in Moscow, it was 100,000 tonnes.

Finally, the fallout from the invasion of Ukraine has sharply hit Russia’s potato supply chains. Moscow might yet rue its decision in January 2024 to restrict seed imports from countries deemed as "unfriendly", which included all European Union member states. 

Oksana Lut, the Head of the Ministry for Agriculture in Russia, succinctly summed up in a recent meeting how a policy of economic isolationism has led to potato shortages.

Oksana Lut:

"If in recent years we annually imported around 10,000 to 12,000 seeds from the European Union, this season we imported 290 tonnes from Germany."

The Russian response to the potato crisis has been two-fold.

First, Putin turned to his long-term ally Belarus. According to Belarusian State Media, President Aleksandr Lukashenko is keen to back the Russian President and to make a tidy profit on the side.

Unfortunately, potato growth fell even more (by up to 23 per cent) in Belarus. Unfavourable growing conditions – made more likely by climate change – as well as inadequate storage (more than 40 per cent of those kept in storage spoiled) were to blame again.

Many of the remaining potatoes have already been sold to Russia. The capacity to help their Eastern neighbour is limited.

Lukashenko has turned his ire on both senior figures in government and farmers alike. In a televised address in February, Lukashenko called out his government’s insufficient storage capacity and has gone so far as to blame corruption and collusion with foreign marketers for poor government procurement.