Russian drones target Ukraine grain ports on Danube

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan warns Vladimir Putin against taking steps that would escalate war.

A drone attack damaged this building at a Ukrainian port on the Danube. Picture: AFP

Russia has launched a wave of drone strikes on Ukraine’s ports, heightening concerns the war could again disrupt a significant portion of the world’s food supply.

The strikes, using Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones, hit grain silos, a terminal and port administrative buildings in southern Ukraine at Izmail on the Danube River. The port city is the country’s one remaining outlet for Black Sea grain shipments after Russia left the export deal in July.

The Ukrainian air force said it destroyed 11 of the drones deployed in the southern region of during the Wednesday attack, and shot down 23 throughout the country.

The attacks intensify Russia’s assault on Ukrainian ports and agricultural infrastructure since the Kremlin chose not to extend the Black Sea Grain Initiative. That agreement, brokered by the UN and Turkey, allowed Ukraine to resume exports from three of its ports last year, helping lower the global price of food.

“The world must respond. When civilian ports are targeted, when terrorists deliberately destroy even grain elevators, it is a threat to everyone on all continents. Russia can and must be stopped,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Since exiting the deal, Russia has carried out a series of missile and drone strikes on Ukraine’s ports and grain terminals and threatened to attack commercial ships in the Black Sea.

The attack on Ukraine’s Danube ports is significant because the river has taken on greater importance in the grain supply chain since Russia imposed its de facto blockade on the much larger ports around the city of Odesa.

Ukraine uses the Danube route to ship grain on smaller ships, often to Romania, where it is loaded on to larger vessels that take it to the world market. Russia has less capacity to threaten the western Black Sea, which includes the territorial waters of NATO members Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. The river now accounts for about a quarter of Ukraine’s total exports and US and European officials have sought to support Ukraine’s shipments via the river.

Ukraine accounted for 9 per cent of the world’s exported wheat and nearly half the world’s supply of sunflower oil prior to Russia’s invasion and was a key supplier to Europe, the Middle East and Asian countries.

Last week, a senior EU official said he believed that by September, Ukraine could use EU routes to export enough grain to replace the amounts it had been selling through the Black Sea Grain ­initiative.

Wednesday’s attacks came the same day as a highly anticipated phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who helped negotiate the grain agreement last year and has played a key role in pressuring Moscow to remain in the deal. He warned Mr Putin against taking steps to escalate the war and said Turkey would engage in “intense” diplomacy to restart the grain deal.

Russia’s withdrawal from the deal has strained Mr Putin’s relations with Mr Erdogan, who until recently was one of the few world leaders to hold regular phone conversations with the Russian President. Mr Erdogan shifted his foreign policy toward the West in recent weeks, signalling approval for Sweden’s entrance to NATO and returning a group of Ukrainian military leaders to their country.

The Wall Street Journal