I think you are referring to an event in Ukraine where some of the peasantry burned crops, but some exports were still bound for the cities. In the Irish potato famine, the UK exported food from Ireland even as people starved to death. In the US, farmers burned crops and poured out milk in the great depression as people starved.
Juxtaposed, there is little reason to treat foreign governments as inherently worse than our own and much reason hold them to similar evidentiary standards. My hope is that the standard would be high for both domestic and foreign stories.