“Ukraine has just taken an important step in restoring freedom of navigation in the Black Sea”, welcomed on the social network X (ex-Twitter), Wednesday August 16, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, after the announcement of the departure of a first cargo ship from the port of Odessa via a new maritime corridor set up by Kiev.
The exit of the Hong Kong-flagged container ship Joseph Schulte is akin to a challenge to Moscow as Russia has threatened to target any boat sailing to or from Ukrainian ports, following the expiration of the grain agreement which has allowed Ukrainian goods, since the summer of 2022, to leave the ports in the south of the country despite the blockade.
The vessel, which “sails along the corridor provisionally established for civilian ships”, according to Olexandr Kubrakov, Ukraine’s infrastructure minister, was heading Wednesday afternoon for the Turkish port of Ambarli in the Sea of ??Marmara. It is the first cargo to leave the major port of Odessa in southern Ukraine since July 16, the minister said.
New Russian attacks on port infrastructure
The Ukrainian authorities announced on August 10 that they would “provisionally” open such maritime corridors. And this despite the attitude of Russia, whose army has a large hold on the Black Sea, which last weekend fired warning shots at a cargo ship heading for Izmail, a Danube port in southern Ukraine.
This river has become one of the main exit routes for Ukrainian agricultural products since Moscow canceled in July the agreement on grain exports, a source of income for Kiev. The Russian army continued overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday to bombard the Danube port infrastructure, with a new drone attack. “Grain warehouses have been damaged,” Odessa region governor Oleh Kiper said.
Romania has strongly condemned these Russian strikes, which come after several other attacks on the gates of this NATO country in recent weeks. “Through these gross violations of international law, Russia continues to endanger food and navigation safety in the Black Sea,” said Romanian Foreign Minister Luminita Odobescu.
These Russian raids along this river show that Russian President Vladimir Putin “does not care” about the supply of essential foodstuffs to developing countries, reacted, for his part, to American diplomacy who called on Moscow to restore “immediately” the grain deal.
