The Black Sea’s trade corridors are at the center of the Russia-Ukraine war again, as they were from 2022 to 2023, when a Russian naval blockade stopped Ukrainian maritime exports and shook agricultural markets worldwide. The current crisis looks similar, but it’s unique in important ways, as are the alternatives to resolve it.
On July 23, Ukraine announced that maritime transport to and from its three unoccupied Black Sea ports was effectively frozen. Russian missile and drone attacks in July alone targeted 57 Ukrainian and foreign-flagged merchant ships in ports and at sea, including Golden Leo, a Turkish-owned bulk cargo carrier sailing under the flag of Guinea-Bissau. Three Russian missiles struck it in open water off the coast of Odesa on July 19, killing 10 people; the ship sank on July 27. By then, this year’s strikes had already cut Ukraine’s grain exports by roughly a third and doubled shipping freight costs into and out of the country.
The Black Sea’s trade corridors are at the center of the Russia-Ukraine war again, as they were from 2022 to 2023, when a Russian naval blockade stopped Ukrainian maritime exports and shook agricultural markets worldwide. The current crisis looks similar, but it’s unique in important ways, as are the alternatives to resolve it.
On July 23, Ukraine announced that maritime transport to and from its three unoccupied Black Sea ports was effectively frozen. Russian missile and drone attacks in July alone targeted 57 Ukrainian and foreign-flagged merchant ships in ports and at sea, including Golden Leo, a Turkish-owned bulk cargo carrier sailing under the flag of Guinea-Bissau. Three Russian missiles struck it in open water off the coast of Odesa on July 19, killing 10 people; the ship sank on July 27. By then, this year’s strikes had already cut Ukraine’s grain exports by roughly a third and doubled shipping freight costs into and out of the country.
As in 2022-2023, when a Russian naval blockade trapped millions of tons of Ukrainian grain and sparked a global food crisis, Ukraine’s Black Sea ports are out of business due to the attacks, even if most of the facilities are still operable. Agricultural stocks are piling up, and global grain markets are tightening. Ukraine’s agricultural sector is staring at a direct loss in export revenue between $1.5 billion and $3 billion this year, according to its agriculture minister. Ukraine’s Black Sea maritime corridors handle approximately 90 percent of the country’s agricultural exports, along with the lion’s share of its mining and steel products. These sectors account for three-quarters of Ukraine’s foreign-currency earnings.
This is why Ukraine urged the United Nations on July 27 to help facilitate safe transit through the Black Sea, as the U.N. temporarily succeeded in doing in 2022. Ukrainian officials accused Russia of war crimes and economic terror over attacks on civilian cargo ships and grain terminals. They argued that Russia is holding global food security hostage, just as it did four years ago. They compared Russia’s actions against food supply chains to disruptions of energy routes in the Strait of Hormuz, warning that developing nations could face hunger and rising prices.
But the current crisis is different from the previous one in key respects.
The 2022-2023 events involved Russian warships imposing a classic blockade on Ukraine’s ports, forming a cordon around the Odesa coast with vessels and mines that prevented the entry and exit of Ukrainian and foreign ships. The blockade began in late 2022, just as Ukraine was processing a record agricultural harvest from the previous year. Ukrainian silos were full, and roughly 20 million tons of grain endedup stranded. The crisis reverberated around the world, including to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, where dozens of low-income countries rely on Ukrainian grain. Prices shot up, and although the shortage did not lead to famine, it caused hardship and food instability.
The European Union came to Ukraine’s rescue by opening maritime passages through Danube ports in Romania and Bulgaria, and by offering rail and road access to international markets through Central Europe. The deal threw a lifeline to Ukraine by enabling it to sell its goods in EU markets, including Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia. But domestic farmers in those countries struggled to compete with the sudden influx of Ukrainian produce and grains, and they protested vigorously. Politicians responded by slapping embargoes on Ukrainian agricultural goods despite EU policy to the contrary.
In July 2022, the U.N. brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a safe maritime corridor for food and fertilizer exports, in exchange for easing Western sanctions on Russian food and fertilizer exports. (Russia broke the agreement less than a year later and has since regularly targeted and harassed shipping in the Black Sea corridors.)
In appealing to the U.N. again in July, Ukraine clearly hoped for a repeat intervention and used the same language. But this crisis, thus far, hasn’t triggered anything like the food market turmoil of four years ago—yet. “In February 2022, agricultural stocks in Ukraine were full,” Oleg Nivievskyi, of the Kyiv School of Economics, explained. “That’s why the impact was so heavy.” This time, however, Ukraine had already shipped its recent harvest before Russia shut down the ports, and global grain markets are relatively flush, he said.
Moreover, the impediment this time around is not a physical blockade. Russia is not obstructing ships but rather strikingthem, their crews, and their cargo directly. That makes the financial risk so great that merchant vessels won’t make the trip. War-risk premiums on freight rates and shipping insurance have spiked, if the latter is even available from underwriters. As a result, ship owners are citing force majeure to walk away from charters. Grain isn’t moving despite an open corridor. This is a market collapse driven by cost and risk, not a siege.
That points to possible remedies: affordable war-risk insurance—through state-backed damage compensation, for example. But the logic of this hard-nosed financial calculus raises serious ethical questions, as a similar paradigm does in the Strait of Hormuz. War-risk insurance compensates for financial loss: the vessel, the cargo, and liability payouts if crew are killed or injured. This is compensation, not protection. The insurance makes the voyage financially viable for the owner; it does nothing to reduce the physical risk to the people actually on the ship.
In the Gulf, after hostilities knocked out commercial war-risk coverage starting in March 2026 and premiums spiked fivefold, the United States set up a $20 billion maritime reinsurance plan that covered hull, cargo, war protection, and indemnity. It’s still operating, but it hasn’t fully worked: Most shippers are still steering clear of the Gulf.
The backstop solved the insurability problem without solving the risk-to-life problem. Stephen Cotton of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) summed it up: “These are not accidents, not collateral damage, these are deliberate acts against civilian workers who have no part in this conflict and no power to escape it.” No cargo, no contract, no commercial pressure is worth a seafarer’s life, the ITF underscored. “Until there is genuine, guaranteed safety, no vessel should be transiting this war zone with civilian crew aboard.”
The go-to option is the alternative routes and markets provided in 2022-2023. Some of the load can be shifted to Danube River routes in the autumn (once water levels rise from their current historic lows) and overland through Central Europe. This, of course, assumes that Central Europeans will play ball—and that is in no way assured. This time, there is no discussion of completely reopening EU markets like in 2022.
Moreover, even given good will, these corridors simply can’t absorb the roughly 2.5 to 3.5million tons a month of capacity that Ukraine has lost from its deepwater ports. River exports on the Danube currently move around 100,000 tons a month. Truck exports, roughly, can handle another 100,000 tons a month, and rail to the western border tops out at 300,000 to 400,000 tons, according to Ukrainian sources. European ports already have their own exports to store and ship, and it’s not clear how much spare capacity they have.
“In the longer term, Ukraine has no viable substitute for its Black Sea ports,” Slawomir Matuszak, of the Warsaw-based Center for Eastern Studies, said. The Danube ports, he argued, are very small and could handle half of the Black Sea ports’ monthly capacity at best. The roads and railways through Central Europe are underprepared for Ukraine’s prodigious loads. Together, they could handle half of the Black Sea ports’ monthly capacity at best, and the alternative routes would cost Ukrainian exporters an additional $45 to $50 per ton, according to Reuters.
The picture is further complicated by Ukraine’s own strikes on Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov using one-way aerial and maritime drones. On July 10, Russia halted Kerch Strait transit after drone attacks had hit more than 100 vesselsin the area, and it exported just 1.8 million metric tons of wheat in July—down around 830 percent from the same month in 2025. Russia’s busiest seaport—Novorossiysk on the Black Sea’s northeast coast—is virtually idle. Ukraine may be inflicting economic damage on Russia, but it’s also straining global grain supplies itself, even as it asks the U.N. to force Russia to stand down on humanitarian grounds—a contradiction that Kyiv didn’t acknowledge in New York.
Russia’s main grain lobby group complained Russia’s main grain lobby group complainedon July 31on July 31, apparently with a straight face, that Ukrainian strikes on its transports could result in hunger in Africa and the Middle East.
Global grain markets are jittery but functional for now. “In September and October, however, there’ll be a new harvest,” Nivievskyi said. Come autumn, the world could face a food crisis every bit as severe as the one in 2022.