Russia targets site near Romania
Escalates attacks on Kyiv’s exports
For the first time, Russia on Monday attacked a port on the Danube River in Ukraine, close to the Romanian border, Ukrainian and Romanian officials said, destroying a grain hangar in an escalation of its assaults on Kyiv’s agriculture and risking a more direct confrontation with the United States and its European allies.
The assault on the port in the town of Reni, across the river from Romania, a NATO member, targeted Kyiv’s alternative export routes for grain to reach world markets, days after Russia terminated a deal that had enabled Ukraine to ship its grain across the Black Sea. The attack is the closest Moscow has come to hitting the military alliance’s territory since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.
The port strike came amid two drone attacks in central Moscow on Monday morning that Russian officials blamed on Ukrainian forces. At least two nonresidential buildings were hit about 4 a.m. local time, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin of Moscow said on the Telegram messaging app. He added that there had been no “serious damage or casualties.”
Ukrainian and Romanian officials denounced the port strike, with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis condemning the attack on Ukrainian infrastructure close to his country’s borders. He said on Twitter that the “recent escalation poses serious risks to the security in the Black Sea,” as well as affecting Ukrainian grain shipments and global food security.
Romania’s Defense Ministry said it was maintaining a posture of “enhanced vigilance” with its allies along the alliance’s eastern flank. But the ministry added in a statement that “there are no potential direct military threats against our national territory or Romania’s territorial waters.”
Since Russia pulled out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative last week, its forces have launched a barrage of attacks nearly every night on the city of Odesa — which is about 130 miles from Reni — and its Black Sea port, destroying grain stocks and infrastructure. Those attacks, along with Moscow’s warning that it would consider any ship approaching Ukraine’s Black Sea ports as potentially carrying military cargo, made Ukraine’s alternative grain routes more vital.
Ukraine, a major producer of grain and other food crops, has been exporting around 2 million metric tons of grain per month through its Danube ports, according to Benoît Fayaud, the deputy executive director of Stratégie Grains, an agricultural economy research firm.
The attack in Reni, about 70 miles from the coast, could deter commercial vessels from using the port in the short term and raise the cost of insurance, Fayaud said.
Global wheat prices rose by around 5.5 percent in Monday morning trading.
The Moscow and Danube attacks occurred amid a grinding war that has seen Ukraine mount a slow counteroffensive to take back territory seized by Russian forces. Ukraine has rarely admitted to attacking Russian territory far from the front line, but the drone strike in Moscow was not the first since the war began.
Cheerleaders of Russia’s war praised the strikes on the port as a further step toward destroying Ukraine’s economy and blocking what they described as Western arms deliveries.
They said that Kyiv had been taking advantage of the port’s proximity to NATO territory.