The Golden Leo was heading out of Odesa with 2,800 tons of corn when three cruise missiles struck it on July 19. Ten crew members died. The bulk carrier capsized a week later, five nautical miles off the city’s crowded beaches.
The attack was one piece of a wider breakdown described by Sam Henry Lazarus, a geoeconomic analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations. In his account, the Russia-Ukraine war flared again along its southern maritime front in July 2026, ending a three-year détente in the Black Sea and closing ports just before harvest. The disruption touches 17 percent of the world’s traded grain. Unless tensions ease quickly, he warns, food prices will climb and millions could slide into acute food insecurity.
Ukraine’s ports under fire
Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry counted 124 Russian attacks on ports and waterways around Greater Odesa in July alone. At least twenty port workers and sailors were killed and hundreds injured. On September 12, cruise and ballistic missiles and 129 drones hit Odesa and the surrounding region.
Lazarus points to a new weapon. Ukraine is short of ballistic-missile interceptors, and its air defenses are struggling against jet-powered cruise missiles called “Banderols,” launched from occupied Crimea or from drones and attack helicopters. Each is five meters long and carries a 150-kilogram warhead. Ukrainian intelligence puts the unit cost at $150,000 to $300,000 and says dozens are built every month. Vladyslav Vlasiuk, Ukraine’s commissioner for sanctions policy, says they feature in 80 percent of strikes on the Odesa-area ports.
Ships are targets too. Russia has hit at least fifty-seven cargo vessels in the Black Sea since June. Daily arrivals at the Odesa-region ports fell from more than five in June to about one in July, and cargo handling dropped by over 90 percent.
The money is draining away fast. Customs data for the first two weeks of August showed grain exports down 76 percent from a year earlier, and Ukraine is losing roughly $70 million a day in export revenue. Economy minister Oleksandr Kravchenko estimates the blockade and the infrastructure strikes will cost 1.5 percentage points of GDP this year and put $40 billion of exports at risk.
Russia’s side
Ukrainian drones struck more than one hundred vessels in the Sea of Azov over ten weeks, and Russia stopped commercial transits through the Kerch Strait and the Don-Azov canal on July 10. In 2025 those routes carried up to a quarter of Russian wheat exports.
Then came Novorossiysk, which loads a further 40 percent of the country’s grain. On August 12, hundreds of drones, anti-ship missiles and unmanned boats crippled the port. The next afternoon the KSK terminal, the largest on Russia’s Black Sea coast, also stopped work, leaving all three grain terminals idle and about twenty-six million tons of annual capacity out of action. Partial operations resumed, but a drone strike damaged the Demetra-owned NZT terminal on September 10.
Altogether, Ukrainian attacks have destroyed or idled more than 70 percent of Russian grain export capacity. Russia’s July exports fell about 38 percent from the year before, and August shipments were the lowest for that month in sixteen years. Analysts expect only 5.6 million tons of Russian wheat to ship from July through September, against 11.3 million tons last year.
Prices and the hunger risk
Russia and Ukraine grow roughly 14 percent of the world’s wheat between them. Russia supplies about 21 percent of global wheat exports and Ukraine around 6 percent, per US Department of Agriculture data cited by the author.
Chicago wheat futures passed $7.90 a bushel in early September, the highest since February 2023 and up over 50 percent on the year. They have since settled near $7.09. SovEcon’s Andrey Sizov says most market participants remain “too complacent.”
Alternatives are thin. Ukraine’s agriculture minister, Taras Vysotskyi, told Reuters that Danube river craft, rail and trucks can handle only 50 to 55 percent of the seaports’ monthly capacity, and Moscow has struck the Maiaky highway bridge and the Danube port of Izmail. About eighty vessels sit stranded on the Danube because of low water. Russia’s overland, Baltic and Caspian routes may reach less than half of earlier levels, and Ukrainian drones have already hit the Baltic fertilizer hub of Ust-Luga.
According to Zelenskyy, Moscow refuses to consider a Black Sea truce or new grain corridor unless Ukraine halts its attacks on Russian energy assets. “This will be like Hormuz, only agricultural,” the Ukrainian president said.
Global stockpiles are bigger than in 2022, Lazarus notes, but the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says much of that buffer is wheat in Russia and Ukraine “linked to restricted export routes.” A super El Niño, drought and the spring closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which sent fertilizer prices soaring, add pressure. At current rates, the closure would cut Russian and Ukrainian grain exports by more than twenty-eight million tons between July and March, about 5.5 percent of all grain traded last season. World Food Program models suggest the resulting price rise could push more than fifteen million people into acute food insecurity.
