Ukraine’s grain exports fell 75 percent in the first two weeks of August, compared with the same stretch of 2025. Vessel traffic through the country’s Black Sea ports has largely stopped since July 22, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Black Sea ports previously handled approximately 90 percent of Ukraine’s agricultural exports.
Russia’s own grain trade is hurting too. A summer of tit-for-tat strikes on ports and ships has cut into both countries’ exports during the peak of the wheat season.
Two blockades at once
Ukrainian officials say Russia has attacked at least 57 cargo vessels in the Black Sea since June, some carrying Ukrainian grain. Port authorities cited by The Independent counted more than 70 strikes on ports in July and early August and 62 hits on vessels. Russian drones have also gone after Ukrainian railways, and the Danube ports of Izmail and Reni have been hit regularly.
Ukraine has answered in kind. Its forces attacked 76 vessels leaving Russian ports between July 6 and July 11, Ukrainian officials say. Russia suspended exports through the Don-Azov Channel in mid-July; the Sea of Azov had handled approximately one-quarter of its wheat exports. A strike on a major grain terminal at Taman followed on July 29. Then on August 12 Ukraine hit Novorossiysk, which accounts for 40 percent of Russian grain exports, and all three of its grain terminals stopped work. The CSIS says Tuapse, a secondary port, is now Russia’s only operational one on the Black Sea.
The think tank estimates the attacks have removed about 70 percent of Russia’s grain export capacity and about 90 percent of Ukraine’s. Russia has exported an average of 5 million tons of wheat in August in recent years. This August, estimates run from 3.0 million metric tons down to 1.5 million.
Prices and the people who feel them
Chicago wheat futures have reached their highest levels since 2023. The UN’s Food Price Index put world wheat prices 15 percent higher in August 2026 than a year earlier, though cereals overall remain well below the 2022 peak. At Oxford Economics, assistant industry economist Pablo Meijer expects the World Bank food price index to rise around 9.3 per cent in 2026, easing to around 4.4 per cent in 2027. He lowered an earlier forecast of 11.8 per cent because the disruption “has proved to be a problem of movement rather than availability.”
Ugo Astuto, the EU’s ambassador to South Korea, laid out the human stakes in an op-ed for Yonhap News Agency. “Russia is choking off Ukraine’s options for transport of grain across the Black Sea, the Danube River and overland corridors,” he wrote. He said Ukraine’s grain exports halved in August from a year earlier, and warned that more than 9 million tonnes of grain, oilseeds and meals could end up without storage by November. Farmers who cannot sell may lack the cash to plant again.
“This matters in a world where an estimated 645 million people face hunger,” Astuto said. Before the full-scale invasion, he noted, Ukraine supplied 15 percent of global corn exports, 10 percent of wheat exports, 15-20 percent of barley exports and 50 percent of sunflower oil exports.
The EU’s Solidarity Lanes, running since May 2022, carried 95 per cent of Ukraine’s non-agricultural exports in July but only 20 per cent of its grain, oilseeds and related products, The Independent reported. “These measures can only mitigate the consequences,” Astuto wrote. “They cannot substitute for safe navigation in the Black Sea.”
Talks, but little give
On August 13, Ukraine proposed through a third party that both sides stop hitting civilian targets in the Black Sea. Russia dismissed the offer the next day, CSIS reported. Zelensky has said Russia wants a ceasefire on grain ships to cover its energy infrastructure too, without halting its own attacks on Ukraine’s energy system. Turkey, India, Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations joined talks on reopening shipping at the end of last week, he said.
Natia Seskuria of the Royal United Services Institute sees little room for a deal. “The Kremlin has little reason to make concessions, because its strikes on Ukrainian ports and energy infrastructure are a source of political leverage,” she said. A limited, time-constrained arrangement is the most realistic outcome, in her view.
Sources
- EU envoy warns Russia-Ukraine war threatens global food security, calls for 'unconditional' ceasefire | Yonhap News Agency
- The crippling effect we’re all feeling from the deadlock in Ukraine’s war with Russia
- How Do the Latest Black Sea Attacks Affect Global Food Security?
