The container ship Joseph Schulte arrived in Istanbul on Thursday night, after setting sail from Odessa on Wednesday morning with 30,000 tons of cargo. It was the first time that a merchant left a Ukrainian port since, on July 17, Russia canceled the agreement with Ukraine for the transport of grain from that country through the Black Sea, created with mediation by Turkey and the UN.
Moscow had warned that any ship serving Ukraine could be considered a potential enemy (Kiev said the same, in reciprocity, of ships assisting Russia). The threat affected shipowners and insurance companies, but only one incident has been made public, which had no consequences. On August 13, the Palau-flagged Turkish cargo ship Sukru Ocan was boarded by a Russian helicopter after a patrol boat fired shots into the air. The ship continued on course towards the Ukrainian port of Izmaïl, on the Danube. The Turkish protest against an "escalation" was not made known until the Joseph Schulte reached the Bosphorus.
The Joseph Schulte sailed near the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria in a corridor agreed between Kyiv and the International Maritime Organization. It was a trial that would open the possibility that other ships blocked in Ukrainian ports could leave, although this ship may have had the protection of flying the flag of Hong Kong (owned by a Chinese bank and the shipping company BSM), given the good relations that exist between Moscow and Beijing.
Numerous cargo ships await their turn in the Black Sea, off the mouth of the Danube, and some are headed for Ukrainian ports. This route, through the Romanian channel of Sulina, which leads to the great European river, is today the best option for the shipment of grain (the export route is maintained by land, through Poland and to Baltic ports) , but it is not without risks.
Russia has bombed the Black Sea ports (Odessa, Yuzhne and Chornomorsk), but also the Ukrainian ports on the Danube of Izmaïl and Reni; has destroyed silos and infrastructure to prevent ships from loading. The fact is serious, because the other side of the river belongs to Romania, a NATO member country. Meanwhile, in the Black Sea the situation is also disturbing.
The almost defunct Ukrainian navy, which appears to consist of naval drones, is attacking Russian ships almost daily. In April, he attacked with drones Sevastopol, the base of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, and just a year before he sank his flagship, the cruiser Moskvà, with a Neptune missile, only to recover the island a few weeks later of the Serps in an air-naval operation. In August, on the 4th and 5th, Kyiv said it had attacked a landing ship in the Russian port of Novorossisk and an oil tanker in the Kerch Strait. On the 17th there were new attacks, without success.
According to The New York Times, these actions are not funny in Washington. Several NATO spy planes patrol the Black Sea, which is not only the most militarized in the world, but also a first-rate energy corridor, crossed by oil and gas pipelines from Russia, where there are also oil tankers loaded with crude oil, near of 20% of Moscow's exports.
Thus, adventurous ideas to evade the Russian blockade of cargo ships, such as the one proposed by Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO military chief, are ruled out. Escorting merchant convoys with warships would lead to an escalation and is also not practicable. Turkey, which controls the straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles (according to the Montreux Convention, of 1936), wisely decided to block the passage of all military ships in the Black Sea, taking advantage of the fact that the presence of warships obeys a regulation that prevents concentration. Not even the Russians have been able to replace Moscow.
That leaves the solution to the grain conflict in the hands of a renegotiation of the agreement, as several African leaders have told Vladimir Putin they want. But while a meeting between Putin and the Turkish president, Erdogan, is expected, the exit continues to be on the Danube. And in the face of the possibility that Russia will completely destroy the Ukrainian port infrastructure on the river, it seems that there is already a remedy without the need to increase anti-aircraft defense against Russian drones in a place that is still the most extreme point of the country.
At the moment, Romania has announced that it will double its capacity to re-export Ukrainian grain, and the Sulina canal has so far taken almost half of the total grain that flows through the so-called solidarity lines of the European Union. The United States will provide technical assistance to keep the channel running day and night. The capacity of the port of Constanta, where many cargo ships returning from the Danube are headed, will be expanded, new border crossings with Ukraine will be opened and a rail connection will be reactivated. This is the most interesting part, as it assumes that the Ukrainians take their cargo to the Romanian port of Galatsi instead of their own ports of Izmaïl and Reni: Russia is not expected to attack a port of a member country NATO.
An unexpected consequence of this war is that Romania may be settling an old dispute, at least temporarily. Ukraine and Romania share the Danube Delta, and for almost 20 years Bucharest has been denouncing Ukraine's intention to drain and widen the so-called Bistroie Canal, located between the branch of the Danube that forms the border between the two countries and the Black Sea, to make it more navigable. For Ukraine it was about not having to pay the Romanians for the use of the Sulina canal. For Romania, the works would affect the entire delta. Most of this delta belongs to them and has been a biosphere reserve since 1993, it is one of the most important wetlands in Europe, with 5,000 species of animals and plants (including the European pelican colony plus big).The European Union has always sided with Romania in this matter, and finally in March told Kyiv to forget about the drainage of the Bistroie canal, which it was about to undertake, and embrace the Romanian offer. Anyway, they pointed out in Bucharest, the Russians could always bomb it.
