Two of Russia‘s biggest grain terminals at the southern port of Novorossiysk have suspended operations as a result of overnight Ukrainian drone strikes, four industry sources told Reuters on Wednesday.
Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter and most of those exports are shipped via its Black Sea ports like Novorossiysk. Russia‘s main grain lobby group warned last month that Ukrainian drone attacks could shut down grain exports via the Black Sea in the near future, pushing up prices and causing hunger in Africa and the Middle East.
One industry source, who declined to be named due to the matter’s sensitivity, said the Novorossiysk grain terminal — which has an export capacity of 8.5 million metric tons per year — had suspended operations, and that an assessment of the damage was underway. A spokesperson for Demetra Holding, which owns the terminal, only said that the terminal had sustained unspecified damage and declined to comment further.
NKHP, another large grain terminal at Novorossiysk with an export capacity of 7.1 million metric tons per year, was also damaged and had halted operations, three industry sources told Reuters. OZK, its principal owner, said in a statement that it had been damaged and that nobody had been hurt. It said it would provide further details when they became available.
Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Krasnodar region, where the port city is located, said a “massive” wave of Ukrainian attacks had targeted the area and killed at least two people, including an eight-year-old child.
Aside from grain export terminals, Novorossiysk also plays host to oil export infrastructure, including for the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which is owned partly by U.S. oil majors Chevron and Exxon and carries Kazakh oil exports to market. The FT reported on Wednesday that Ukraine has halted its strikes on tankers servicing the CPC, after a request from U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
There was no indication that the CPC, or tankers collecting oil from the pipeline, had been struck during the overnight attacks.
Eight people, including a child, were injured in the attacks, which also saw another person killed and a few others wounded in the wider region, Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Russia‘s southern region of Krasnodar, where Novorossiysk is located, said on Telegram separately.
Elsewhere, in Sevastopol, in Russia-occupied Crimea, more than three dozen drones were downed, the city’s governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram. A few houses were damaged in the attack, but there were no injuries, he added.
Separately, a Russian attack caused a fire at a shopping mall in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, regional Governor Ivan Fedorov said on Telegram, posting pictures of a building ablaze.
The attack cut off power for some 1,200 consumers in Zaporizhzhia, Fedorov added.
A separate Russian attack on Odesa, Ukraine’s largest seaport, damaged infrastructure there, Serhiy Lysak, head of the city’s military administration, said on Telegram, without giving details.
Moscow has recently intensified strikes on Ukraine’s food, agriculture and warehouse facilities, in response to Kyiv’s attacks on Russian energy, port and logistics hubs.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that Kyiv had handed proposals to U.S. negotiators for a plan to end the war, which started with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
