And when the cost-of-living rises, and people have less purchasing power, the economy slows. Data last week showed the growth of retail sales stagnating. The UK’s post-pandemic recovery has most definitely lost its bounce.

Yet when it comes to serious economic fallout, it strikes me that what matters more about this Russia-Ukraine conflict than the impact on energy prices is the impact on the price of food.

The Western political and media class has yet fully to grasp the pivotal importance of Russia, Ukraine (and Russia’s ally Belarus) in the global agricultural supply chains. World food prices jumped nearly 13pc in March alone, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization’s price index, in large part due to the impact of this conflict.

Both Russia and Ukraine are major producers of wheat, barley and others crops – millions of tons of which are exported via Ukraine. Ordinarily, around a third of the world’s grain exports are shipped from Black Sea ports, exports which have basically collapsed.

If the right political deals are struck, fuel supplies can be boosted pretty quickly. Embargoed energy from Russia (or Iran) can be released on global markets, or the Saudis can turn the spigot, bringing prices back from the stratosphere.

Yet crops need to be planted and animals reared over time – and this Russia-Ukraine conflict is messing with that. Not only is planting in Ukraine itself seriously disrupted, but as this war and related sanctions drive up fertiliser prices, that’s affecting planting much further afield too.

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus account for about two-fifths of world’s potash exports and between them export almost a third of fertilisers made from nitrogen and phosphorous. Pretty much all such exports are now blocked either by sanctions or conflict – one reason UK farmers are paying up to five times more for fertiliser than this time last year.

So just as UK food security is coming into focus, British farmers – hit with both spiralling fuel and fertiliser prices, their two main costs – are now planting less, not more. Rising feedstock prices, again linked to spiralling wheat and grain prices, are meanwhile causing the price not just of bread, but also eggs and milk to spiral.

Having said all that, the most serious economic fall-out from this Russia-Ukraine conflict, outside of Ukraine itself, will be felt beyond the West.

The world is, to a large extent, still eating crops harvested in 2021. We will soon switch to food produced this year. But sky-high fertiliser prices mean much less is now being planted – storing up a serious calorie deficit.

Already, in Egypt, the jump in the state aid needed to make traditional flatbread affordable for the poor is straining the Cairo government’s budget. In Turkey, cash-strapped shoppers are forming long lines to buy cheap, government-issued bread, now unaffordable on the open market.

The Arab Spring – the series of protests and armed rebellions that spread across North Africa and the Middle East in the early 2010s – was sparked and sustained in large part by spiralling food prices. These regions depend heavily on gigantic crop shipments, not least from Russia and Ukraine.