Oleksiy Vadaturskyi was known as a “grain tycoon” who helped turn Ukraine into a key exporter of wheat, Al Jazeera reports.

On Sunday, the founder and owner of Ukraine’s largest agricultural company “Nibulon” Oleksiy Vadaturskyi and his wife were killed during a Russian attack in the city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, which raised suspicions among Ukrainian politicians and experts, who qualified their deaths as a planned crime. in order to delay the recovery of exports.

Unlike other oligarchs – a group of super-rich and unpopular Ukrainians with enormous political influence who gained control of key industries after the privatization of Soviet factories and plants – Vadatursky was widely respected as a self-made man.

“He was working. He did not use the Soviet industrial heritage. He built his empire on the ground,” Kyiv political scientist Vadym Karasyov told Al Jazeera. “He was one of those who created the Ukrainian miracle of grain export.”

Employees, partners and even business competitors called Vadatursky, who was 74 years old, “grandfather”.

His companies owned hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile “black soil” in 10 regions of Ukraine.

He grew wheat, one of the main areas of Ukrainian agriculture, which accounts for 15% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and provides about a tenth of the world’s grain exports.

His consortium “Nibulon” raised cows, produced sunflower oil, had a network of warehouses and grain terminals.

Nibulon also built a fleet of ships that helped revive river shipping in post-Soviet Ukraine – and delivered grain, oil and steel to ports on the Black and Azov seas.

Dozens of ships designed and built from scratch at the Wadaturski Shipyard carried millions of tons of cargo a year, saving roads and highways whose asphalt was often destroyed by giant grain trucks every fall.

The ships also dredged riverbeds to improve navigation, carried passengers and were increasingly used in the Ukrainian fleet.

Vadatursky’s decision to open a hub in the southern city of Mykolaiv, where four giant Soviet-era shipyards produced hundreds of ships, including China’s first aircraft carrier, surprised many.

“I, an agrarian, was forced by life to engage in shipbuilding, to open a shipyard and build my own fleet,” he allegedly said after one of the old shipyards failed to build cargo ships for him in time.

His explanation was simple. “If there is a problem, I solve it,” he allegedly said.

Premeditated murder?

Even in his seventies, Vadaturskyi looked young, with the gait of a person who spent a lot of time in nature.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, seizing some of its key assets in the eastern and southern regions and blocking sea routes for grain exports, Vadatursky did not surrender or leave Ukraine.

He worked tirelessly to restore grain shipments – and was killed a day before they were to be restored.

A Russian missile hit the bedroom of his spacious mansion.

Several politicians immediately declared that Vadaturskyi’s death was not just an accident.

“A precise hit not only in his house, but in a specific wing, in the bedroom, leaves no doubt that the hit was aimed,” Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi, wrote on Telegram.

Vadaturskyi’s killing was part of a wider campaign of “resulting terrorist attacks aimed at intimidating, destabilizing and dividing Ukrainian society,” he added.

Boris Filatov, the mayor of Dnipro, was also categorical that Vadaturskyi’s death was planned.

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