KYIV — Ukrainian officials announced Tuesday that every citizen will plant one sunflower for each Russian missile launched since February, a mobilization that will produce a living barrier stretching from the Polish border to the Black Sea and, according to the Ministry of Agrarian Counteroffensive, «make the steppe itself a participant in the war.»
The planting schedule, published as a single-page timetable, assigns each region a two-hour window. Farmers who finish early are instructed to begin planting for the following week's anticipated strikes. «We are not waiting for the missiles,» said Deputy Agriculture Minister Oksana Hrytsenko. «We are pre-planting the answer.»
Neighboring countries have requested observer status. Poland sent a delegation of agronomists; Moldova offered its entire national seed reserve. In Brussels, officials debated whether sunflower oil futures should be reclassified as a defense commodity, a measure that would allow the EU to buy the crop before it exists.
By Thursday, the first 400-kilometer stretch was complete. Citizens reported that the planting had changed the sound of the war: where once they heard only sirens, they now heard the steady click of seed dispensers. «It is the loudest quiet I have ever known,» said one farmer near Vinnytsia.
Russian officials dismissed the effort as «a garden.» The Kremlin press service added that it would «watch the flowers grow from a safe distance,» a statement that Ukrainian officials immediately printed on seed packets.