- Summary - More than 500,000 tonnes of wheat shipped from Crimea to Syria - Cargoes moved on sanctioned Syrian ships - Ukraine says Russia stole grain from occupied territory - Russian-installed authorities say farmers are paid - Syria's wheat imports now almost all from Russian sources LONDON/DUBAI/BEIRUT, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Using a low-profile fleet of ships under U.S. sanctions, Syria has this year sharply increased wheat imports from the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea that Russia annexed from Ukraine, a sign of tightening economic ties between two allies shunned by the West.Russian forces invaded more of Ukraine on Feb. 24 and despite military setbacks they still control a swathe of the country's agricultural heartlands of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia."CRIMEAN HARVEST" Yevgeny Balitsky, the Moscow-appointed governor of the Russian-occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region said in June that Crimean ports had been used to export grain from Zaporizhzhia.Instead, the wheat cargoes are typically moving to Syria's Latakia and Tartus ports on three Syrian ships, according to two grain trade sources familiar with the journey, the Ukrainian embassy in Beirut, other Ukrainian diplomats, and an analysis from Shipfix.Some shipments also arrived on Russian-flagged vessels, including the Mikhail Nenashev, Matros Pozynich and Matros Koshka, which Equasis, a shipping database, shows are owned by a subsidiary of a Russian state-owned company called United Shipbuilding Corporation."