Filenews 1 August 2023 - by David Axe
Three cargo ships — one of Israeli interests, one of Greek and one owned by a Turkish-Georgian company — broke through the Russian blockade in the Black Sea on Sunday and docked in one of the Ukrainian ports in the Danube Delta from where grain is exported.
Twenty-two days after Moscow cancelled the deal with Kiev – which allowed Ukraine to safely export tens of millions of tonnes of grain – and then threatened to stop maritime traffic to Ukrainian ports, the Russian bluff has been revealed.
"Reports of three cargo ships sailing unhindered toward Ukraine suggest that Russia is either unwilling or unable to impose a naval blockade on the region," the Institute for the Study of War in Washington said.
As Markus Jonsson reports, a swarm of NATO aircraft watched the ships' progress as they sailed to Izmail, a small Ukrainian port just opposite Romania on the Danube River. The ships are expected to load grain at Izmail and then cross the Black Sea to head to their ports of destination.
The Israeli ship Ams1 and the Greek Sahin 2 sailed north through the Bosphorus Strait, while the Turkish-Georgian Yilmaz Kaptan sailed west of northern Turkey.
At least four NATO warplanes patrolled the air: a U.S. Navy P-8 patrol aircraft, a U.S. Army Challenger with surface-detection radar, a U.S. Air Force RQ-4 drone and a NATO E-3 early warning aircraft. Normally none of these planes carry weapons, but NATO fighters such as Italian Eurofighters and Romanian F-16s were in close proximity to Romania.
The three cargo ships did not try to hide. They had their transponders turned on, making their location and route visible to anyone with access to the internet and ship-tracking websites.
Russia's beleaguered Black Sea Fleet, which has lost several ships to Ukrainian missiles and been stranded in the Black Sea since Russia invaded Ukraine, had threatened to block — or even attack — ships attempting to sail to Ukraine.
After Moscow unilaterally cancelled the Black Sea Grain Agreement, which had facilitated the export of 32 million tons of Ukrainian grain, the Black Sea Fleet deployed the corvette Sergey Kotov to the southern Black Sea, within striking distance of the main sea lanes from the Bosphorus Strait to Odessa, Ukraine's strategic port.
Neither the corvette Sergey Kotov nor any other Russian ship intervened as the three cargo ships headed not for Odessa, but for Izmail. Kiev has reconstructed the Danube ports as a wartime alternative.
Russian missiles regularly hit Odessa, but attacks on Danube ports are infrequent, most likely due to the proximity of these ports to NATO territory. The port of Izmail is a few hundred meters from the Romanian border. A Russian drone attack on July 24 against a grain depot in Reni, another Ukrainian Danube port, narrowly did not hit Romanian territory.
Successfully breaking the Russian blockade would send a signal internationally that it is safe to continue grain exports from Ukrainian ports. "Russian forces appear unwilling or unable to forcibly stop and search neutral ships heading to Ukraine via the Black Sea, even though they have seemingly set the conditions to do so," the ISW noted.
Whether any shipping companies will risk the longer journey to Odessa, 100 miles north of the Danube Delta, remains an open question. Danube ports cannot fully replace Odessa as a key grain export port.
