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Ukraine has intensified its use of a new sea route that has allowed it to begin reactivating grain exports to circumvent the de facto Russian blockade of its Black Sea ports.
Repeated airstrikes by Russian forces since July against the Ukrainian port of Odessa, after the Kremlin withdrew from a deal that had allowed Ukraine to export its food crops directly across the waters to Turkey, forced Ukraine to leave to use its three Black Sea ports as an export route and work to establish an alternative.
Two ships successfully used the new route last week without incident, and three more cargo ships entered Ukrainian waters in recent days, according to officials.
When Moscow withdrew from the Black Sea Grain Initiative in July, it said it would consider any ship approaching a Ukrainian port as a potential carrier of military cargo and therefore a threat. The following month, members of the Russian military boarded a cargo ship at gunpoint, reflecting rising tensions in the Black Sea, which Western analysts have warned could escalate into violence involving countries not directly involved. involved in the war.
With Ukrainian Black Sea ports under fire, its shipping had been limited since July to exports on the Danube River through much smaller ports (which have also been attacked in recent weeks) and aboard much smaller vessels. Ukraine has also exported some grain since the large-scale invasion by road and rail into the European Union began, although this too has been plagued by difficulties amid opposition from the governments of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.
But last week Kiev successfully tested a new sea route, when two cargo ships loaded with wheat sailed along the coast from Romania and then crossed back across Romania’s maritime border. As Romania is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, ships sailing in its waters are considered much less likely to be attacked. The second ship carrying Ukrainian wheat arrived in Turkey via the Black Sea on Sunday, shipping traffic monitoring sites showed.
Three more cargo ships, the Azara, the Ying Hao 01 and the Eneida, have entered the time corridor, Ukraine’s infrastructure minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said Friday in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Kubrakov said the ships were “using the temporary corridor established by the Ukrainian Navy” and would export 127 metric tons of Ukrainian agricultural products and iron ore to China, Egypt and Spain.
The website MarineTraffic, which tracks global shipping using satellite data, placed the Azara, Eneida and Ying Hao 01 in or near Ukrainian ports south of Odessa on Friday and Saturday. However, the website did not provide precise information about the location of the three ships on Sunday, instead designating them as out of range. That could suggest that the ships had turned off their transponders, perhaps for safety reasons.
Ukraine is a major exporter of wheat and other food crops and its agricultural sector is a vital part of the country’s economy.
As of last week, it appears that Russia has made no public attempt to prevent commercial ships from progressing along the new route. Moscow’s navy, the preeminent military force in the Black Sea, has faced increasing pressure from Ukrainian missile and drone attacks in and around Crimea, the peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
Ukraine has attacked the Russian Black Sea Fleet since the start of the full-scale invasion of Moscow 19 months ago, sinking the fleet’s flagship, the Moskva, in April last year. But since July, Ukraine has intensified its attacks. In the latest major attack on Friday, it used long-range missiles against the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in the Crimean city of Sevastopol.