Ukrainian and Romanian officials said Monday that Russia launched its first attack on a port on Ukraine’s Danube River near the Romanian border, destroying a grain hangar in an escalation of efforts to undermine Kyiv’s agriculture and risk a more direct confrontation with the United States and its European allies.
The attack on the port of Reni, a town across the river from NATO member Romania, targeted Kyiv’s alternative export routes for grain to reach world markets, days after Russia terminated a deal allowing Ukraine to ship its grain across the Black Sea. The attack is the closest Moscow has come to hitting a military coalition area since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.
The port strike came amid two drone attacks in central Moscow on Monday morning, which Russian authorities blamed on Ukrainian forces. At least two non-residential buildings were hit around 4 a.m. local time, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging app. There were no “serious damages or casualties,” he said.
Ukrainian and Romanian officials condemned the port strike, as did Romanian President Klaus Iohannis. Condemned the attack Ukrainian infrastructure is close to its country’s borders. “The latest escalation poses serious risks to security in the Black Sea,” he said on Twitter, as well as affecting Ukrainian grain shipments and global food security.
Romania’s defense ministry said it was maintaining a posture of “enhanced vigilance” with its allies along the alliance’s eastern flank. But the ministry added in a statement that “there are no potential direct military threats against our national territory or Romania’s territorial waters.”
After the Kremlin pulled out of the Black Sea grain initiative last week, its forces launched almost nightly raids on the city of Odessa, about 130 miles from Reni, and its Black Sea port, destroying grain stockpiles and infrastructure. Those attacks, along with Moscow’s warning that it considers any ship approaching Ukraine’s Black Sea ports as potentially carrying military cargo, have made Ukraine’s alternative grain routes increasingly important.
Ukraine, a major producer of grain and other food crops, exports about two million metric tons of grain a month through its Danube ports, said Benoit Fayad, deputy executive director of Strategy Grains, an agricultural economics research firm.
Mr. Fayoud said the attack at Reni, about 70 miles off the coast, could prevent commercial ships from using the port in the short term and increase insurance costs.
Global wheat prices rose nearly 5.5 percent in early morning trade on Monday.
The Moscow and Danube attacks come amid a grinding war that has seen Ukraine mount a slow counter-offensive to take back territory seized from Russian forces. Kyiv has rarely acknowledged attacking Russian territory far from the front lines, but the drone strike in Moscow was not the first since the war began.
In May, eight drones targeted the Russian capital, Moscow, smashing windows in three residential buildings and injuring two residents, officials said. The strikes confronted Muscovites with the reality of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which President Vladimir V. Putin worked to shield from their daily lives. The attack came after Russian forces launched another in a series of overnight attacks on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
After Monday’s drone strike, videos reviewed by The New York Times showed damage in at least two locations near the Moskva River in southern Moscow. One building is a block away from Russia’s National Defense Management Center, an imposing structure used to conduct “centralized combat management of the Russian Armed Forces,” according to the ministry’s website.
Smoke can be seen rising from the upper floors of a high-rise building that houses a French home-improvement chain. Other footage showed damage to several structures along Komsomolsky Prospekt – which runs through one of the most expensive parts of central Moscow and is close to the Defense Ministry – including the building of the Military University and the Central Military Band, a performance group of the Russian armed forces.
It could not be determined whether the drones caused damage. But authorities blocked off part of Komsomolsky Prospect after finding one of the drones there, state news media reported. Russian officials said they destroyed two drones.
Later on Monday, another drone crashed near a residential building in Moscow’s Pervomysko district, but no injuries were immediately reported, local news outlets said.
Oleh Kiper, head of Ukraine’s regional military administration in the region, wrote in a telegram that the attack on the Danube port took place over a period of four hours. Ukraine’s air defense shot down three drones, injuring seven people, three from shrapnel, he said. One was seriously injured.
Mike Lee, director of Green Square Agro Consultancy, which specializes in the Black Sea and Eastern Europe, called the attack on Reni a “massive escalation” by Moscow that could affect Ukraine’s ability to use alternative routes for its exports.
Russia last year fired on western Ukraine near the border with Poland, also a NATO member, but did not hit Ukrainian facilities near an area covered by the military alliance’s commitment to jointly respond to an attack on a member state. NATO and Poland have said that what exploded a few miles outside Ukraine’s border in November was the remains of a Ukrainian surface-to-air missile, although US and NATO officials still blame Russia as the aggressor.
Russian war cheerleaders hailed the strikes on the port as a further step towards curbing what they describe as Western arms deliveries that are destroying Ukraine’s economy.
He said Kyiv had taken advantage of the port’s proximity to NATO territory — and that ships could approach it along the Danube without having to sail through Ukrainian waters in the Black Sea — as a way to export grain and other goods during the war.
“It looks like they are blocking this way of circumventing the sea blockade of Kyiv,” Russian talk show host Olga Skabayeva said on Rossiya state television channel. “And soon they will completely deny Ukraine access to the Black Sea.”
A popular pro-war blog called Rybar claims that the port of Reni is being used to supply Ukraine’s military with grain exports.
On Monday, the FSB, Russia’s successor to the KGB, claimed it had evidence that Ukraine had imported explosives into one of its Danube ports via the Black Sea in May. The claim could not be independently verified.
The Danube River Delta, a network of waterways crossing the border region of Moldova, Romania and Ukraine, was rarely used to export Ukrainian grain before the invasion, but has become indispensable since last year.
A grain deal brokered by the United Nations and Turkey last year covered three major Black Sea ports and enabled Ukraine to ship more than 30 million tons of grain. At the same time, smaller ports on the Danube that were not part of the treaty were able to send shipments bound for the Black Sea and international destinations.
Those routes — as well as overland routes — became important after Russia terminated the Black Sea treaty and said it had to meet its demands. Moscow has bitterly complained that the deal is biased towards Kyiv and that Western sanctions restricting the sale of its own agricultural products should be lifted, among other demands.
Russia’s efforts to freeze Ukraine’s exports will exacerbate the hunger crisis facing some countries in Africa and the Middle East, the United Nations said. Ukraine exports grain by road and rail to European Union countries and via Danube ports.
Since the start of the war, Ukraine has sent more than 20 million tons of grain to foreign markets through Romania and millions more by rail through Poland, angering Eastern European farmers who said it depressed local prices. After protests in some EU countries, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia allowed Ukraine to ban domestic sales of wheat, corn, rapeseed and sunflower seeds, though allowed shipments of those items to be exported elsewhere.
The ban is expected to end on September 15. Last week, ministers from those five countries called for the ban to be extended.
On Monday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed back on that idea, saying extending the ban on Telegram was “unacceptable in any form.”
Yuri Shaivala, Anton Troyanovsky And Gabriela Sa Pessoa Contribution report.
