Almost everything Ukraine sells abroad from its farms leaves through three deep-water ports clustered around Odesa. Russia has spent the summer hitting those ports and the cargo ships calling at them, and shipowners have responded by refusing to come. Without ships, traders stop buying, grain piles up inland, and the harvest has nowhere to go. That is the mechanism now showing up in Ukraine’s trade figures.
Agricultural exports fell 23.4% in July as grain, oilseed and meal shipments dropped, according to the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food, with analysts warning August could be worse.
The scale of the attacks explains the drop. Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry counted 35 attacks on vessels sitting in port during July, 22 more at sea and 67 strikes on port facilities — against 14 vessel attacks in all of 2025. Kyiv told the OSCE that Russian strikes have destroyed 1,054 pieces of port infrastructure and hit 232 ships. The deadliest came on July 19, when missiles struck the Golden Leo, a Turkish-owned bulk carrier leaving Odesa loaded with grain, killing ten.
Capacity has collapsed accordingly. The Odesa ports once handled about 6 million tonnes of cargo a month; that has fallen to roughly 4 million. Deepwater terminals that could stockpile up to seven million tonnes a month can now hold four to five, a gap of about 2.5 million tonnes. Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said no vessel had entered the region’s ports for nearly two weeks, describing the blockade as <cite index=”107-1″>“in some aspects more difficult than it was in early 2022.”</cite>
The overland alternatives cannot come close to covering it. Rail and the Danube combined can move at most about 1 million tonnes a month — roughly a third of Black Sea port capacity — and record-low Danube water levels are now hampering navigation on top of that. Danube river exports run about 100,000 tonnes a month, trucking roughly the same, and rail to the western border crossings tops out between 300,000 and 400,000 tonnes. Moving grain is also getting more expensive: Türkiye raised its transit fee by about 15% on July 1, and Ukraine’s state railway proposed a 30% rate increase from August 1 that would add $5 to $6 per tonne.
The financial hit is measured in billions. Vysotskyi put potential losses to the agricultural sector at $3 billion this year and warned that just over 30 million tonnes of production will not reach international markets unless shipping is restored. Ukraine risks running out of grain storage capacity by early November. Private terminal operators have lost an estimated $1.5 billion since the invasion and cannot fund repairs on their own, according to the farmers’ union.
Farmers are absorbing the squeeze first. With buyers unable to ship, farm-gate prices have split from world prices: rapeseed fell about $70 a tonne in a week, and wheat at the farm is fetching roughly a fifth less than last autumn. Roughly 10 million tonnes of unsold produce from last year’s harvest had already accumulated in storage by early July, leaving growers at risk of missing loan repayments and entering autumn sowing without cash.
The cruel timing is that the crop is a good one. UkrAgroConsult raised its forecast for Ukraine’s 2026/27 grain and pulse production to 64.3 million tonnes, about 2.7 million above last year, on expanded planted area and favorable weather. Ukraine had forecast exports of around 43 million tonnes for the season that began in July, against more than 37 million last year. Analysts caution that a bigger harvest guarantees nothing: port operations, freight and insurance costs, and access to working capital will determine how much actually ships.
World markets have been swinging on every headline. Euronext September milling wheat jumped 7% on July 15 to €231.75 a tonne, its highest since February of last year, while Chicago wheat rose 5.6% and Kansas hard red winter futures hit their daily limit. Over the full month, Euronext December wheat gained about 9% and the September Chicago contract roughly 8.5%. The rally cooled this week, with Euronext December wheat down 1.7% at €227.75 on Thursday as large global supplies offset war-disruption fears, tracking a slide of more than 2% in Chicago to a four-week low. Russia and Ukraine together are forecast to supply more than 30% of the world’s wheat exports in 2026/27.
The diplomatic effort is aimed squarely at getting ships moving again. Ukraine’s agriculture and foreign ministries have agreed on joint steps to support agricultural exports and open new markets, and Kyiv is working with Romania to expand capacity at the port of Constanța. Officials describe restoring safe shipping and full-scale exports from the Greater Odesa ports as the urgent task, with no alternative route available in the medium term.
JBizNews Desk | Kyiv
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