Ukrainian Prime Minister Olexander Kubrakov said on Saturday that two civilian cargo ships docked at a Ukrainian port on the Black Sea, the first time this has happened since Russia closed the grain deal.
The shipping companies to which the ships belong clarified that they stopped at the port of Chornomorsk, to load around 20 thousand tons of wheat destined for African and Asian countries, Kubrakov explained via Facebook.
The two ships, the Resilient Africa and the Aroyat, sail under the flag of the state of Palau (in the Pacific) and their crew are citizens of Ukrainian, Turkish, Azerbaijani and Egyptian origin, according to Kiev.
Although Kubrakov did not specify the arrival time of the cargo ships in Chornomorsk, the two ships were already in port in the afternoon, according to the marine traffic control website MarineTraffic.
Since the beginning of the invasion in February 2022, Russia has been blocking Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea, something that generated great unrest from the first moment, due to fear of famine in some countries, since Ukraine is a large cereal exporter.
In this context, the UN and Turkey acted as intermediaries in negotiating an international agreement that would allow Ukrainian agricultural exports to reach world markets from three ports, including Chornomorsk. However, after the agreement expired in July, Moscow refused to extend it.
Similarly, after the deal ended, Moscow began attacking Ukrainian port infrastructure, and in response, kyiv established a temporary corridor through the Black Sea for civilian ships to transit at their own risk.
So far, five cargo ships have used the aforementioned corridor with the aim of leaving Ukrainian ports, some of which were blocked since the start of the war.
However, no civilian cargo ships had docked in Ukrainian ports.
Source: TSF
