War Hits Queens Market Stocked With Russian Goods: Report

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — The Forest Hills grocery store Gastronom International Market stopped getting its usual food shipments two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine.

"Everything is stopped because it's coming through Russia," Lillia Nikolov, the market's owner, told Fox. "Even Moldovan products, Ukrainian products, Latvian products, everything's stopped; it's all going through that way."

Nikolov is one of many Eastern European grocers in New York City contending with supply chain disruptions as a result of President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

"I don't know what's going to happen now," she told the outlet, noting that while her shelves are currently stocked with the usual assortment of sweets, pasta, and dried fruit that her customers expect, all of that could run out in the next couple of weeks.

"The pasta comes from Russia, even the buckwheat, the semolina, the rice," she said. (Gastronom International Market did not respond to Patch's request for further comment.)

Agricultural commodities are among the products that have seen sharp price fluctuation in recent days, as Russia's military invasion severs supply chains already rattled by the pandemic.

Recently-imposed U.S. sanctions, primarily targeting financial and technology sectors, don't include food, as of yet, but those sanctions could come further down the line — either from the U.S., other countries, or Russia, if it responds with retaliatory sanctions.

Russia and Ukraine's Black Sea farmlands, which are known as the "breadbaskets of the world," produce about a quarter of the world's wheat, including bread, pasta, and packaged foods that billions of people across Europe, Africa, and Asia rely on.

The intensifying humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, however, is a bigger issue for Alex Moltzav, the owner of a Russian market in Brooklyn, as compared to his market's supply chain issues.

"The business will survive but let us all survive in this situation, that's more important than my business," he told Fox of his Brighton Beach grocery store, Gold Label.

Moltzav, who is in close contact with suppliers in Russia who provide him with about one-third of his market's goods, and expects that in the coming week the supplies will become too expensive for him to buy.

"There is a limit on how much people are going to pay even for the items they like," he told Fox, noting that if necessary he will stock his shelves with domestic products — a move that his customers agree with.

"Can't get Russian food? Ok, American food," one shopper told the outlet.