Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended the country’s trade route map
At the wheel of his German sedan heading straight for Poland, on a snowy road in western Ukraine, Valeriy Krupko tastes his new life. He sometimes misses Kherson, a port city in the south of the country that he left a few months ago. He remembers the “containers hanging from cranes swinging in the sky”, “ships that came from all over the world”. He ran a port terminal there until it closed in February 2022, at the start of the war.
As a symbol of the transformations of the Ukrainian economy, here he is at the head of another terminal, far from the sea and the container ships, planted in the middle of a landscape of snow and emaciated trees, in Mostyska, near the Polish border.
In the country at war, the new trade routes are overland and all lead to the European Union (EU). Since the closure of many Black Sea ports and the closure of the borders with Russia and Belarus, Ukraine finds itself anchored to the European economy. Thus, 53.6% of its exports went to the EU in 2022, compared to only 39.1% in 2021. After falling at the start of the conflict, exports to the Union have even recovered spectacularly at their pre-war level, around 2.5 billion euros, whereas overall they fell by 35% that same year.