On the ground in Ukraine | Voices from Odesa

ODESA, Ukraine — Voices from Odesa: A farmer, a grain dealer and a port official describe the disastrous impact of the Russian shipping blockade.

Ninety minutes from the city, past endless fields of harvested grain and un-harvested sunflowers, I met with Vitaly Yashnikov, 45, a thin, drawn farmer on the verge of bankruptcy. He points at the holes in his tractor where flying metal shell fragments pierced it, after he spent $3,000 he couldn’t afford to fix the tractor’s windshield which was shattered by a missile explosion. “We are very close to the front lines and there is constant shelling,” he told me, as the wind whipped around us. “About a fifth of my wheat fields have burned and much of my land is too close to the frontlines to harvest. I am woken up by the sound of missiles. No one could have imagined that the war could come here.”

After agricultural college, Yashnikov started with 40 hectares of tomatoes (one hectare equals approximately 2 ½ acres), and grew his farm to 350 hectares of wheat, barley, and sunflowers (for oil). His storage facilities and much of his cropland are in territory now occupied by the Russians. Yet it is far too expensive to truck what grain he has harvested to European markets. So while he tries to save his harvested grain from rotting, he also has to decide by the start of planting season in mid-August whether it is worth sowing his remaining fields — and risk hitting a mine. “If I can’t sow I will go bankrupt,” he says grimly. He has sent his son to Kyiv and told the 23-year-old not to come back.

I met with Dmytro Barinov, deputy CEO of government relations of the Ukrainian port authority in Odesa, in the city’s small central park, since port buildings were off-limits to nonstaff. In 2014, when I visited last, the park was packed with locals picnicking, dancing to a live music band or dining at outdoor restaurants lining the greenery; those are mostly closed.

In the eight years since Russians first invaded Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, Russian navy ships have blocked two dozen Ukrainian ports on the Azov and Black Seas, preventing grain shipments on which the world depends. Only three small ports on the Danube remain functional. Ukraine has mined the Odesa coast to prevent Russians from making an amphibious landing.

Barinov is originally from the port city of Mariupol, which Russian forces have totally razed. “It is unbelievable what the Russians did there,” he said. “I can’t believe in the 21st century this could happen.” Before the current war, he told me, Ukraine exported more than 5 million tons of agricultural produce a year, but now only 1 million can be exported via the Danube or trucks and rail.

With 2 million tons of grain left over from the previous Ukrainian harvest and a new harvest producing another 20 million tons, “there is not enough storage capacity in Ukraine,” Barinov said. “The Russian navy should leave,” he said, because the Russians could renege at any point on the recent blockade suspension agreement and try to attack the Odesa port.

I sat with grain trader Vladyslav Volyanskyy, CEO of the ALK Trading company, at the “Book Market,” an outdoor arcade in central Odesa. This space used to feature a lively strip of shops and restaurants but was now was almost empty. Volyanskyy, wearing jeans and a BOSS T-shirt, mused on how drastically his business had changed since the Russian invasion. “Before the war, grain came to a distribution center in the Odesa port and ships could take 20 to 60,000 tons at the same time.” Now, trying to ship via Danube ports or truck grain to Romania doubles the price per ton, which is why world grain prices are so high. Delays at border crossings — up to 17 days at the Romanian border — sends the cost even higher. And, Volyanskyy added, only 5% of the previous ship-delivered tonnage can be exported by truck.

“We are at the edge of bankruptcy,” Volyanskyy said. “Our silos are full. Some grain is at risk of rotting and there is no space left to store new harvest.” The Russians now occupy the land where his firm’s silos and sunflower processing plant are located, and they have removed grain from his silos to somewhere “unknown,” he said.

Volyanskyy ignores the air raid sirens that frequently ring out in town. “You can get used to war, but never to the killing,” he said. He said has no confidence in the grain deal, which was negotiated by Ukraine, Russia, the United Nations, and Turkey. “We can’t understand what is happening behind closed doors. We have to live in this day, not hoping for anything.”

He does entertain the slight possibility that Turkey might yet convince Moscow to respect the deal its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan godfathered. If not, he said, “some will die of hunger, and we will have rotting grain.”