Ukraine's alternative grain export routes will not reach the capacity needed to compensate for Russia's blockade of Black Sea ports until the end of August at the earliest, and even then will cover only half the volume normally handled through Odesa, Agrarian Policy Minister Taras Vysotskyi told Reuters in an exclusive report on August 4.

Russia has intensified missile and drone attacks on foreign-flagged civilian vessels around Odesa, the hub that handles most of Ukraine's grain shipments, endangering exports of roughly half this year's forecast grain and oilseed crop. “A significant amount of production - specifically, just over 30 million tons - will not be exported to international markets unless this issue is resolved,” Vysotskyi said.

Ukraine recorded 35 attacks on vessels in port and 22 at sea in July, plus 67 strikes on port facilities, according to the infrastructure ministry - against just 14 vessel attacks in all of 2025. Shipowners have suspended calls at the Odesa-area ports entirely: no vessel has entered the region's ports for almost two weeks, Ukrainian MP Levan Gudadze reported on X, citing Vysotskyi, with losses to the agricultural sector potentially reaching $3bn this year - a blockade Vysotskyi called “in some aspects more difficult than it was in early 2022,” the war's first year. Since July 22, the ports of Odesa, Chornomorsk and Yuzhny have not received or dispatched a single foreign cargo ship.

Rerouting around a chokepoint

State rail operator Ukrzaliznytsia is in talks with neighbouring countries to expand transit corridors and is already diverting grain to the Danube ports, Romania's port of Constanta, and onward to Slovakia and Hungary, chief executive Oleksandr Pertsovskyi told Bloomberg. “We are currently diversifying export routes,” he said. “We believe that the situation in Odesa ports will be better, but we are still building alternative routes.”

Even combined, the railway and Danube route can carry only a third of the capacity of Ukraine's Black Sea ports, Vysotskyi said - a maximum of 1mn tonnes of grain a month working with partners, further constrained by record-low water levels on the Danube hindering navigation. Unless flows through Odesa are restored, Ukraine risks exhausting its grain storage capacity by early November, with Bloomberg warning the disruption could feed a wider cost-of-living crisis across the Middle East and North Africa, which rely heavily on Black Sea grain.

IntelliNews has tracked the deterioration of the export outlook through July, including a deadly strike on a Togo-flagged vessel at Odesa port that killed three crew members - part of a campaign that has already pushed Ukrainian producers' oilseed and grain prices down by 30% on average as buyers price in the disruption. Russia, itself the world's largest wheat exporter, has reported its own attacks on agricultural export facilities and vessels in the Black Sea in recent weeks, part of a broader pattern in which both sides are now hitting each other's commercial shipping directly rather than treating civilian cargo routes as off-limits.