Terrorussia kills one of Ukraine’s most prominent agribusiness figures

The Nibulon founder and Ukrainian Grain Association president, Oleksiy Vadatursky, and his wife Raisa died yesterday in one of russia’s most brutal shellings of Mykolaiv. They were killed just a day before the first ship, loaded with 26,000 tons of Ukrainian corn, has left an Odesa port since the beginning of russia’s blockade.

“It is exactly such people, such companies […] that have guaranteed the world’s food security,” President Zelensky said about Vadatursky in his daily address Sunday late night. And the advisor to the head of the Presidential Office, Mykhaylo Podolyak, said he has no doubts that hitting the bedroom of one of Ukraine’s greatest agrarians and a key figure in the region was not an accident but a premeditated assassination.

A multimillionaire on the Forbes list, 74-year-old Oleksiy Vadatursky could easily choose any safe and comfortable place in the world to wait out the war. But “no, the old man obstinately and stubbornly stayed in his native Mykolaiv under the daily shellings, working out alternative routes for the Ukrainian grain export,” points out Dnipro Mayor Borys Filatov, who also cannot believe in a chance.

Oleksiy Vadatursky was born on Sep. 8, 1947, in Odesa Oblast’s village of Bendzary to a family of a kolkhoz member. In 1971, he graduated from the Odesa Technological Institute (now the Odesa National Academy of Food Technologies) and made a career in the Soviet-era bakery industry – from a chief power engineer at a bread-baking plant up to a deputy head of the Mykolaiv Oblast Bread Products Department.

Since 1991, Oleksiy Vadatursky has been the director general of the Nibulon agriholding engaged in state-of-the-art crop growing, livestock breeding, and shipbuilding. In 2007, he was awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine and decorated with the Order of the State.

UWC condoles with the family and friends of Oleksiy and Raisa Vadaturskys. May their souls rest in peace. No words can ease the loss, but we are sure that all those involved in this sneaky crime will be punished – from the soldier who launched the missile all the way up.