ANKARA

Russian forces stole 400,000 tons of grain from the four Ukrainian regions they occupied, local media reported on Wednesday.

They stole 100,000 tons of grain from each occupied region – Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk, said Taras Vysotskyi, Ukraine’s first deputy minister of agrarian policy and food, according to news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda.

This amounts to one-third of all reserves in these regions, he noted.

If this continues and if Russians take away what was left in the regions for food before the new harvest, there is a risk of famine, the report warned.

At least 3,238 civilians have been killed and 3,397 others injured in Ukraine since Russia launched a war on the country on Feb. 24, according to UN estimates. The true toll is feared to be much higher.

More than 5.7 million people have fled to other countries, with some 7.7 million people internally displaced, data from the UN refugee agency shows.