Russia launched its first attack on a port on the Danube in Ukraine near the Romanian border on Monday, Ukrainian and Romanian officials said. In the process, the country destroyed a grain hangar, escalating efforts to shut down Kiev agriculture and risking a more direct confrontation with the United States and its European allies.
The attack on the port in the city of Reni, opposite Romania, a NATO member, days after Russia, targeted Kiev’s alternative export routes for grain to reach world markets canceled a deal This had enabled Ukraine to ship its grain across the Black Sea. The attack is one of Moscow’s next attacks on the military alliance’s territory since Russia’s sweeping invasion of Ukraine last year.
The port strike took place between two drone Attacks in central Moscow on Monday morning that Russian officials 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 news app. He added that there was no “serious damage or loss”.
Ukrainian and Romanian officials, including Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, condemned the port strike condemn the attack on the Ukrainian infrastructure near the borders of his country. He said on Twitter that the “recent escalation poses a serious risk to Black Sea security” and also affects Ukrainian grain supplies and global food security.
Romania’s Defense Ministry said it maintained an attitude of “increased vigilance” towards its allies along the alliance’s eastern flank. However, the ministry added in a statement that “there are no potential direct military threats against our national territory or the territorial waters of Romania”.
Since the Kremlin withdrew from the Black Sea Grains Initiative last week, its forces have springed into action a barrage of attacks Almost every night, the city of Odessa – which is about 210 kilometers from Reni – and its Black Sea port attacks, destroying grain stores and infrastructure. These attacks, along with Moscow’s warning to consider any ship approaching Ukraine’s Black Sea ports as potentially military cargo, made Ukraine’s alternative grain routes more important.
According to Benoît Fayaud, deputy managing director of Stratégie Grains, an agribusiness research firm, Ukraine, a major producer of grains and other food crops, exports around two million tons of grain a month through its Danube ports.
The attack in Reni, some 70 miles from the coast, could deter merchant ships from using the port in the short term and increase insurance costs, Mr Fayaud said.
Global wheat prices rose about 5.5 percent in Monday morning trade.
The attacks on Moscow and the Danube came amid a bitter war that made Ukraine ever stronger a slow counteroffensive to recapture territory captured by Russian forces. Kiev has rarely admitted to 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 were aimed at Moscow, the Russian capitalAccording to officials, he shattered windows in three apartment buildings and injured two residents. The attacks confronted Muscovites with the reality of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which President Vladimir V. Putin had tried to shield from their daily lives. This attack came after the Russian forces took off other in a series of night attacks on the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.
Videos confirmed by the New York Times showed damage in at least two locations near the Moskva River in southern Moscow after Monday’s drone strikes. One affected building is about a block from Russia’s National Defense Management Center, an imposing structure that serves as the “central warfare center of the Russian armed forces,” according to the ministry’s website.
Smoke rose from the top floors of a high-rise building belonging to a French hardware store chain. Other footage showed damage to several buildings along Komsomolsky Prospect — an avenue that runs through one of the most posh parts of central Moscow and near the Ministry of Defense — including the building housing the Military University and the Central Military Band, a performance group of the Russian Armed Forces.
Whether drones had caused the damage could not be clarified. But authorities cordoned off part of Komsomolsky Prospekt after finding one of the drones there, state news media reported. Russian authorities said they destroyed two drones.
Later on Monday, another drone crashed near a residential building in Moscow’s Pervomaiskoe district, but no injuries were reported, local news outlets reported.
The attack on the port on the Danube happened within four hours, Oleh Kiper, the head of the regional military administration in this region of Ukraine, wrote on Telegram. Ukrainian air defenses shot down three drones, he said, adding that seven people were injured, three of them by shrapnel. One suffered serious injuries.
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 in terms of the potential impact on Ukraine’s ability to use alternative routes for its exports.
Russia fired at western Ukraine last year however, near the border with Poland, which is also a NATO member, had not encountered any Ukrainian facilities so close to the area covered by the military alliance’s obligation to jointly respond to an attack on a member state.
Supporters of the Russian war hailed the attacks on the port as a further step in destroying Ukraine’s economy and blocking what they described as Western arms supplies.
They said Kiev took advantage of the port’s proximity to NATO territory — and the fact that ships can approach it via the Danube without passing through Ukrainian waters in the Black Sea — to continue exporting grain and other goods during the war.
“It seems that they are blocking this possibility of bypassing the naval blockade of Kiev,” said Russian talk show host Olga Skabeeva. called on the state television channel Rossiya. “And soon they will completely deny Ukraine access to the Black Sea.”
A popular pro-war blog, also known as Rybar claims that the Reni port was used to supply the Ukrainian military and export grain.
On Monday, the FSB, Russia’s successor to the KGB, claimed it had evidence that Ukraine imported explosives across the Black Sea to one of its Danube ports in May. The claim could not be independently verified.
The Danube Delta, a network of waterways that crisscrosses the border region between Moldova, Romania and Ukraine, was rarely used to export Ukrainian grain before the invasion, but has become essential over the past year.
The grain deal, brokered for the first time by the United Nations and Turkey last year, included three major Black Sea ports and allowed 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 agreement were able to ship shipments that found their way to the Black Sea and onward to international destinations.
These routes — as well as overland routes — became vital after Russia withdrew from the Black Sea Agreement and said its demands must be met. Moscow had bitterly complained that the deal was unilateral towards Kiev and that Western sanctions restricting the sale of its own agricultural products were among other things to be lifted.
The United Nations has said that Russia’s attempts to halt Ukraine’s exports would exacerbate the hunger crisis in some African and Middle Eastern countries. Ukraine exports grain by road and rail to the countries of the European Union and through the Danube ports.
Since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has shipped more than 20 million tons of grain to foreign markets via Romania and millions more by train via Poland, an inflow that has been increasing angry Eastern European peasants Who said it lowered local prices? After protests in some EU countries, the bloc allowed Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia to ban domestic sales of Ukrainian wheat, corn, rapeseed and sunflower seeds, but still allowed transit of these items for export to other countries.
The ban is expected to end on September 15. Last week, ministers from these five countries called for the bans to be extended.
On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed the idea, telling Telegram that an extension of the ban was “unacceptable in any form”.
Yuri Shyvala, Anton Troianovski And Gabriela Sa Pessoa contributed to the reporting.
