Moscow’s refusal to extend the Black Sea Grain Initiative comes as no surprise to Ukrainians, accustomed to Russian blackmail over the deal since its launch a year ago. In Budjak, the Ukrainian part of Bessarabia, in southwestern Ukraine, a landlocked region between Moldova, Romania and the Black Sea, we have become accustomed since the start of the war in February 2022 to see tens of thousands of trucks loaded with corn, wheat or sunflower oil.
Izmaïl, a small port city on the banks of the Danube, has thus become over the months an export platform as a solution to the major ports of the Black Sea. Cereal cargoes, arriving by truck, are loaded there on barges which descend the river to the Romanian port of Constanta, where they are then transferred to a large ship.
“Before, Izmaïl was known to be a dead end, says a cheese seller in the city’s covered market. Now, this whole grain business has opened us up to the world. » Thrown into the heart of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Bulgarian or Moldavian cheese merchants have developed their own geopolitical thermometer. “Izmail’s roads are rutted by the incessant coming and going of trucks heading for the city’s grain terminals, one of them is worried. If there are so many trucks here, that means there are no other ways to export the wheat. And that is not a good sign. »
Even if they hope in the long term for a complete reopening of the Black Sea ports through which most of the Ukrainian cereals transited before the war, more and more producers and traders are turning to the small ports of the Danube, along the Romanian border. Part of the harvest can be sold through this channel, without suffering the vagaries of the Russian controls to which the ships were subject under the grain agreement.
Attempt not to be annihilated
One of the first to grasp the interest of this waterway was Oleksiy Vadatoursky, founder of the main Ukrainian cereal group, Nibulon, based in Mykolaiv, where 30% of Ukrainian cereals were exported. As early as May 2022, when the city was under Russian fire and its grain terminal blocked, he went to Izmail to launch the construction of an alternative terminal. Nothing that can compensate for the enormous capacities of the Black Sea ports, but an attempt not to be annihilated by the Russian machine which is waging its war also on the economic front. Ukraine is an important competitor of the Russian agricultural sector.
You have 61.77% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.