The Ukraine effect: Black Sea trade one year on

Episode 5 of a special six-part series of Lloyd’s List Podcasts examining how the war in Ukraine has had a lasting impact on different aspects of the shipping industry. This fifth edition of the podcast looks the knock-on effect that Russia’s war in Ukraine has had on trade in the Black Sea. To listen to the full series go to: http://bit.ly/3KbnQpS The headline creation of the grain corridor, allowing safe transport of grain out of Ukraine, rightly gathered headlines. It was an extraordinary and unprecedented agreement between enemy combatants. And the fact that it has seen over 25m tonnes exported to date has, quite literally, been a matter of life and death as well as a minor diplomatic miracle. But the initiative is deeply flawed and survives despite its status as a political bargaining chip and routine threats from Russia to shut it down. It is also only part of the story of Ukraine’s Black Sea trades. Ukraine’s seaports were effectively blockaded at the onset of the invasion, cutting off the country’s major supply routes and rattling global markets. The government, in war mode, had to move quickly to keep goods flowing out to the foreign markets that rely on its key commodities, and establish alternative logistics chains so imports could reach the Ukrainian people. A handful of very small government-run ports along the Danube River emerged as critical hubs for wartime trade. The ports of Reni, Izmail and Kiliia, were the country’s only operational ports up until the implementation of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, and they continue to be the only ports where trade can flow unrestricted. These small river ports significantly boosted capacity throughout the first months of the war and have received heavy investment over the last year to improve operational efficiency. In this edition of the podcast Lloyd’s List data analyst Bridget Diakun leads an expert analysis of the lasting impact the war has had on Ukraine’s seaborne trade and the significance of the grain corridor Featured on today’s edition of the podcast: • Katerina Kononenko, a port agent at Avalon Shipping, a shipping agency that specialises in the transit of vessels through the Sulina channel to ports in Romania and Ukraine, explains the significant role that Danube traffic has played in re-routing exports. • Yuliia Matalinets, surveyor at Odesa-based Lloyd’s agents Eurogal talks about the rerouting of logistics lines through neighbouring countries. • Daniil Melnychenko a data analyst at Informall Business Group based in Odesa, walks us through the evolution of boxship trade in the Black Sea over the past year.