The dockers risking Russian rocket attacks to feed the world

In the berths of Odesa port lie ships packed full of wheat, their salt-whipped decks baking under the summer sun. Before the Russian invasion, they had been scheduled to sail for destinations in Europe, Africa and Asia. The grain inside them, and in the nearby silos, would have fed millions.

Instead, a Russian naval blockade has strangled Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea, turning this vast freight hub into the epicentre of the world’s food crisis.

Because of the port’s strategic value, checkpoints and barricades now seal off the entrances, guarded by armed soldiers. Almost all the sailors are gone and outsiders are strictly prohibited.

 “I’ve been thinking about how this wheat is needed in other countries,” said Alexander Shturminskiy, 39, a dock mechanic who has worked in Odesa port for 18 years. “It’s heartbreaking to see the port not working. It’s the heart of the city, it’s the bread that we eat.”

He is part of a crew of dockers who are working relentlessly to move what goods they can on to trains that take the cargo overland towards Romania, Moldova or Poland, and then across the world.

But their efforts are barely making a dent. Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe and more than 70 per cent of its exports pass through Black Sea ports. Last year, farmers harvested more than 100 million tonnes of grain, oilseed and pulses. In peacetime, six million tonnes are exported every month — a trade that stopped the moment Russia launched its assault.

Now, about 20 million tonnes are waiting to be sold, of which about 2.5 million are in storage in ports and 1.2 million are sold, loaded on vessels but blocked in ports. These volumes are so enormous that only a fraction can be taken out over land or up the Danube, where newly expanded river ports — now accessible after the liberation of Snake Island from Russian forces —are bearing some of the burden.

The rest is just sitting in warehouses and silos across Ukraine — and in the holds of the 68 foreign ships trapped in Odesa and other ports — as food prices rise around the world.

Before the war, Ukraine provided 10 per cent of global wheat exports, 12 per cent of maize and 37 per cent of sunflower oil. Without its crops, food supplies around the world are becoming much more precarious, particularly in the drought-stricken Horn of Africa, where millions of people are already facing starvation. Earlier this month David Beasley, the director of the UN World Food Programme, warned that “50 million people in 45 countries are now just one step from famine”.

Shturminskiy and his colleagues are trying every day to salvage what they can, despite the everpresent danger of an attack. Russia has repeatedly targeted ports with rockets and missiles. Odesa port has been struck twice — the first by the wreckage of a Russian missile taken down by air defence, the second by a rocket that hit an oil storage depot.

Shturminskiy, standing by the gates to Odesa port, knows another attack could come at any time but when there is an air raid alert, he and his colleagues ignore them.

“It’s been scary to work there,” he said. “When the sirens come on, we just have to continue working. There are no shelters in the port.”

The Russian blockade of the Black Sea has gutted the very heart of this centuries-old port city, expanded under the rule of Catherine the Great in the 18th century and once the pride of the Russian Empire.

Before Moscow’s assault, billions of pounds of goods flowed through Odesa every year, and sailors from Macau to Naples flocked to its dive bars and dens of iniquity.

More than 5,000 people, many drawn from Odesa’s mix of Greek, Jewish, Armenian, Russian and Ukrainian communities, worked the docks. Everyone here knows someone connected to the port.

When the war came, some of the dock workers signed up to fight. The rest filled sandbags and winched up the great concrete tetrapods that slow down coastal erosion, rolling them out on roads to serve as checkpoints or tank traps — still covered in clusters of blue mussels.

But Russia’s plan to sweep across Ukraine’s Black Sea coast was stopped outside the city of Mykolaiv, 70 miles east of Odesa. Instead of a pitched battle with Russian tanks, Odesans have been confronted instead with economic strangulation and occasional rocket and missile attacks. Although their city has not been ruined and hollowed out like the port of Mariupol further east, commerce has ground to a halt and the population has been terrorised.

Four Ukrainian ports have come under Russian occupation since February. In Mariupol, at least 20 maritime workers were killed in the onslaught, according to local officials. Yet even away from the front lines, nowhere is safe.

 “They’re under constant threat obviously of being attacked by Russian missiles,” said Oleg Grygoriuk, chairman of the maritime transport workers’ trade union of Ukraine. “It doesn’t feel safe, especially bearing in mind that Odesa and Mikolayev are very close to the range of the missiles that can be sent from Crimea, from Russian warships.”

Then there are the mines. Last month a 50-year-old man was killed in full view of his family when one exploded as he swam off a beach in Odesa.

The Ukrainian defenders have mined sections of the coastline, while officials claim Russia has dropped hundreds of mines in the open water of the Black Sea.

Moscow denies it is imposing a blockade, despite clear proof to the contrary.

Negotiations in Istanbul last week led to hopes that a deal might be reached to allow some Ukrainian grain to be taken under Turkish military escort across the Black Sea. Yet serious hurdles remain, and in the meantime, the economic impact continues to mount.

“It’s billions of dollars in losses, and we’re losing every day,” said Dmytro Barinov, deputy head of the Ukrainian sea ports authority. “It’s very bad for our economic situation but at the same time for the world it’s a very bad situation. The European customers are feeling this shortage of Ukrainian agricultural production from a price perspective.”

For the farmers who till the fertile black soil that stretches through the south and east of Ukraine, the blockade has made it incredibly difficult to sell their goods.

On an idyllic farm in southwestern Ukraine, Volodymyr Pogoriliy gestured at an enormous pile of last season’s wheat inside a warehouse. The building should have been empty by now, the wheat sold to traders in Odesa port, who would in turn sell it to buyers abroad. Instead, as the new harvest comes in, storage space is filling up at a rate he’s never seen before.

“None of this would usually be here,” said Pogoriliy, 62, whose family has been working this land for generations. This warehouse alone contained enough grain to make 1,200 tonnes of bread, he said.

 “This could be feeding people in Africa,” said Sergiy Prykhodko, 47, a local official who had accompanied us to the farm.

The farmers too live under threat of attack. Fields and storage areas have been destroyed by Russian bombs. The previous week, a nearby pig farm was hit.

So much wheat has piled up, according to Olena Neroba, business development manager at Maxigrain, a Ukrainian agricultural brokerage firm, that there is a lack of storage space. Farmers told us they were keeping the wheat anywhere they could: from barns to warehouses and outbuildings.

Driving across the country from east to south, the scale of the challenge becomes clear. Endless fields of sunflowers, corn and wheat stretch into the distance, in various stages of harvest.

Near the eastern front lines, fields have been burnt and pitted by shells. Even miles from the fighting, farmers must contend with occasional falling ordnance as they work their land. Yet this month we still saw combine harvesters driving across the fields there, the sound of fighting booming in the distance.

Since the war began, officials and traders have worked relentlessly to circumvent the blockade. The Ukrainian takeover of Snake Island has helped open up the mouth of the Danube for shipping, said Alla Stoyanova, director of the Ukrainian department for agricultural policy, allowing them to export 2.2 million tonnes of wheat via road, rail and riverboat last month.

Yet this is still only a third of the country’s peacetime wheat exports.

“If we don’t stop the war in Ukraine now, all of Europe is going to be in trouble,” said Stoyanova.