On the Danube, a European war is rising again from the riverbed. Near the Serbian port of Prahovo, drought has lowered the river so much that the rusting hulls of German warships have emerged into view. Up to 200 vessels had been scuttled there in September 1944 as German forces were desperately retreating from the Soviet advance.
Eight decades later, the same river has a new significance in another European war. When Russian attacks make Ukraine’s Black Sea ports too dangerous, the Danube is one of the routes Kyiv can use to export grain west. This summer, however, the river itself is failing as an escape route. In Romania, its flow became so slow that it seriously disrupted shipping and power generation.
Russia has meanwhile intensified its campaign against the ports around Odesa, the vital Black Sea city in southwest Ukraine. In July alone, Ukraine recorded 35 attacks on vessels in ports, another 22 on ships at sea and 67 strikes on port facilities. Russia has also hit the infrastructure leading to Ukraine’s alternative routes. On August 9, Russian forces struck the Mayaki bridge linking Odesa toward Moldova and Romania. The Institute for the Study of War said that the bridge was likely targeted to disrupt the land corridor being used as maritime exports faltered.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has an unexpected ally in this campaign: a hotter, drier Europe. He cannot command it, and it does not always favor Russia. But the collision is becoming impossible to ignore. Ukraine has survived much of the conflict by building redundancy systems: new export routes when a port closes, electricity imports when power generation is destroyed, irrigation for crops when rain fails. Extreme heat and drought are putting some of those systems under strain just when Russia is forcing Ukraine to depend on them most.
The Familiar Story
The familiar part of this story is what Putin can control. Russia has spent years attacking the infrastructure that allows Ukraine to function as a state and an export economy. The assault on the power system began in the fall of 2022, when missile barrages hit generating plants and substations across the country. In one day alone, Russia fired at least 65 missiles at homes and energy infrastructure. It has continued the campaign to include gas production, ports, railways and bridges.
The intensity remains severe. Russia recently launched one of the largest drone barrages of the war and Romania has repeatedly scrambled aircraft as drones crossed or approached its territory during bombardments of Ukrainian ports near the Danube, prompting a fresh confrontation between Bucharest and Moscow.
Ukraine’s answer has always been to find another way. When Black Sea shipping becomes too dangerous, grain goes by rail, road and the Danube. When domestic power generation fades, electricity comes from the European grid. When rainfall is low, farms irrigate. That capacity to improvise has been one of Ukraine’s great advantages.
What’s Really Going On
But what happens when the alternatives themselves come under pressure? Moscow has noticed that opportunity, even if it describes it differently.
On August 10, Anatoly Tikhonov, head of the Center for International Agribusiness and Food Security at the Russian Presidential Academy, published an essay through the state news agency TASS. Its title, “Знойный передел: кто заплатит за европейский неурожай”, translates roughly as “A Scorching Redistribution: Who Will Pay for Europe’s Failed Harvest?” The piece begins with temperatures reaching 113F in parts of Europe, which Tikhonov calls an “economic verdict” on a weakened Europe.
So far, so predictable. The interesting part is what Tikhonov believes Russia should do. He says Europe will need more Ukrainian grain, even as Ukraine’s own export potential is being weakened, as well as food from South America, the United States and Russia. Wealthy European buyers, he says, will then compete for supplies with poorer countries in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. He portrays this as another example of Western “colonial logic,” while presenting Russia as a noncolonial alternative. Russia, he says, “must take advantage of the moment.”
Ukraine provides an even more immediate demonstration of why the opportunity highlighted by Tikhonov exists.
Grain
When Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 effectively closed Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, grain moved instead by truck, rail and barge, and Danube ports, such as Izmail and Reni, expanded sharply. After Russia withdrew from the U.N.-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative in 2023, Ukraine eventually established a maritime corridor of its own. The improvised system worked well but did not fully replace what had existed before.
The latest Russian campaign is testing that system again. Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi told Reuters that a little over 30 million tons of grain and oilseeds might fail to reach international markets if the disruption was not resolved, while prices have fallen sharply, and transport costs have soared. He said that rail and the Danube together can carry only about a third of Black Sea port capacity.
This summer, the Danube itself began to fail. World Weather Attribution’s analysis of this year’s European drought found a complicated rainfall picture in eastern Europe. But it estimated that the highly evaporative conditions experienced between January and June 2026 have become about 40 times more likely because of human-caused warming.
Russia is now attacking the Danube fallback directly as well, including the bridge at Mayaki that is part of the land connection toward the Danube ports, most recently on August 9. Ukraine’s Black Sea route is therefore under attack, its Danube alternative is restricted by drought, and the infrastructure serving that alternative is also under attack.
Power
The same collision has already played out in electricity.
Russia intensified its campaign against Ukraine’s power system dramatically in the spring of 2024. By early June, Ukraine had lost roughly 9 gigawatts of capacity. A month later came an intense heatwave. On July 15, Kyiv reached 94F, a record for that date at the time. Grid operator Ukrenergo imposed emergency cuts in seven regions after an equipment failure increased the deficit during the heat.
Margaryta Zakharchuk, a 43-year-old Kyiv mother, described the resulting routine to Reuters. With the elevator to her 12th-floor apartment useless during outages, she sometimes stayed outside with her two children until 10 p.m. rather than carry them upstairs. When the electricity returned, the family rushed to wash, iron, cook and charge devices. She cooled her one-year-old daughter Vasilisa in the sink. Food in local stores spoiled because of the disruption to refrigeration.
Heat raises electricity demand while increasing the importance of everything the missing electricity would have powered: refrigeration, elevators, cooling and machinery. Ukraine’s alternative has been the European grid. The scale of that dependence was clearest this winter, when Ukrainian electricity imports were 41 percent higher in February than January.
Then the direction flipped. By July, Ukraine was again a net electricity exporter, with Hungary the biggest customer. However, that reversal happened while Hungary was discovering its own dependence on the drought-hit Danube. Paks, the nuclear plant that normally provides nearly half the country’s electricity, was forced down to about 10 percent of capacity.
Romania has gone to still greater lengths to keep its reactors operating. Record-low Danube levels forced one of the two units at Cernavodă offline. Authorities blasted away a rock obstruction, dredged the riverbed and sank four rock-filled barges to form a makeshift barrier redirecting cooling water. On August 11, operator Nuclearelectrica warned that Romania might have to shut its last operating reactor in the coming days despite those emergency measures.
What this shows is that the system providing Ukraine’s redundancy contains weather-sensitive infrastructure of its own. Hungary is now reviewing the Paks 2 expansion, partly because its planned reactors would also depend on the Danube for cooling, while accelerating plans for additional wind capacity.
Fire
Ukraine’s 2024 fire season offers a more graphic example of weather magnifying damage caused by war.
Satellite data from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre show that 965,000 hectares burned in Ukraine in 2024, more than twice the area burned across the entire European Union that year. Most major fires occurred during hot, dry summer weather, and their distribution closely followed the front line.
A peer-reviewed study published this year in Fire Ecology, using data from 2001 through 2024, found that rising temperatures and declining rainfall significantly increased fires, particularly in Ukraine’s increasingly arid central, southern and eastern regions. The war separately drove up fire activity near the front, even after climatic and land-use factors were taken into account.
Shelling and missiles ignite farmland and grassland. Mines and unexploded ordnance make access dangerous for fire crews, while damaged roads and disrupted institutions make responding in the first place more difficult. Hotter, drier conditions then increase the chance that an ignition develops into a much larger fire.
Water
Southern Ukraine’s water problem may be even more consequential.
Before its destruction in June 2023, the Kakhovka dam and reservoir supplied 31 irrigation systems across Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk. In 2021, those systems helped produce about 4 million tons of grains and oilseeds. When the dam was destroyed, Ukraine’s Agriculture Ministry warned that at least 500,000 hectares deprived of irrigation could effectively become desert.
The dam was destroyed while under Russian occupation. Ukraine accused Russia of blowing it up, and Russian blamed Ukraine. The Kakhovka reservoir had also been the main source of cooling water for the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest. After the reservoir emptied, wells were dug to provide replacement water, but they aren’t enough. An International Atomic Energy Agency official told Reuters that water consumption would be “orders of magnitude” greater if all the reactors restarted.
Paks, Cernavodă and Zaporizhzhia are not identical cases. Hungary and Romania lost cooling capacity because drought lowered the Danube while Zaporizhzhia lost its principal source because a dam was destroyed during a war. Together, though, they expose how much apparently formidable infrastructure, wherever it is, rests on a less visible assumption: that enormous quantities of water will still be available when needed.
The Risk to Russia
Russia faces its own climate risks. In 2025, roughly 1 million hectares of crops in Rostov were lost or damaged by drought or frost and the damage was severe enough for Moscow to elevate the agricultural emergency to the federal level.
That is partly why Tikhonov’s TASS essay is so revealing. He does not claim that the climate belongs to Russia, and explicitly warns that extreme weather threatens Russian agriculture too. His argument is that Moscow should become better at absorbing the damage than its rivals, thereby taking commercial and political advantage.
What the Danube shows this summer is not that Ukraine has run out of alternatives, but that the alternatives are facing two threats at once.
Russia has spent years trying to reduce Ukraine’s margin for error. A hotter, drier and more combustible Europe may reduce it further. Putin cannot control those forces, but he can still reap the benefits.