Aug 12 (Reuters) – Ukraine hammered Russia’s Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk in a massive overnight drone attack that put two major grain terminals out of action, according to Russian industry sources, raising fears in global markets of a disruption to supplies.<\/p>\n
Russia is the \u200cworld’s largest wheat exporter and most of those exports are shipped via its Black Sea ports like Novorossiysk. Russia’s main grain lobby group \u200cwarned last month that Ukrainian attacks could shut down grain exports via the Black Sea in the near future, pushing up prices and causing hunger in Africa and the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian \u200bPresident Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Telegram that Ukraine had hit Russia’s Novorossiysk naval base with drones, missiles and unmanned boats. Russia moved some of its Black Sea Fleet vessels to Novorossiysk after Kyiv’s forces attacked them repeatedly in Crimea, which Moscow seized and annexed from Ukraine in 2014.<\/p>\n
Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Krasnodar region, where Novorossiysk is located, said a “massive” wave of Ukrainian attacks had targeted the area and killed at least two people, including an 8-year-old child.<\/p>\n
Andrei Kravchenko, \u200cthe mayor of Novorossiysk, said the Black Sea port’s \u2060water supply had been suspended and an emergency situation had been declared following the attack, which damaged four unspecified enterprises, more than two dozen residential buildings and some educational facilities.<\/p>\n
Unverified video on social media showed images of a tower \u2060of flames and smoke rising from somewhere in Novorossiysk.<\/p>\n
Amid fears of disruptions to wheat supplies on global markets, Chicago wheat futures rose around 3% on Wednesday following reports of the Novorossiysk attack.<\/p>\n
Russian strikes on ships in the Black Sea have drastically reduced grain shipments from Ukraine, which is also a major grain exporter. Shipments tumbled \u200b76% \u200bin the first two weeks of August, versus the same period last year, Ukraine’s \u200bagriculture ministry said.<\/p>\n
REPORT OF DEAL ON OIL SHIPMENTS<\/p>\n
Novorossiysk also hosts \u200coil export infrastructure, including for the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which is owned partly by U.S. oil majors Chevron and Exxon Mobil and carries Kazakh oil exports to market.<\/p>\n
The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that, following a request from U.S. Vice President JD Vance in late July, Ukraine had agreed not to target CPC infrastructure and non-Russian vessels, as long as they were not under Ukrainian sanctions or carrying Russian oil or other cargo.<\/p>\n
Ukraine’s presidency did not respond to a request for comment on the story.<\/p>\n
There was no indication that the CPC or tankers collecting oil from the pipeline had been struck \u200cduring the overnight attacks.<\/p>\n
In Sevastopol in Crimea, more than three dozen drones were downed, \u200bthe city’s Russian-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram.<\/p>\n
Separately, a Russian attack caused a fire \u200bat a shopping mall in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, \u200bregional Governor Ivan Fedorov said on Telegram, posting pictures of a building ablaze.<\/p>\n
A Russian attack on Odesa, Ukraine’s largest \u200cseaport, damaged infrastructure there, Serhiy Lysak, head of the city’s \u200bmilitary administration, said on Telegram, without giving \u200bdetails.<\/p>\n
Moscow has intensified its strikes on Ukraine’s logistics and warehouse facilities in response to Kyiv’s attacks on Russian energy, port and logistic hubs.<\/p>\n
Zelenskiy said on Tuesday that Kyiv had handed proposals to U.S. negotiators for a plan to end the conflict, which started when Russia launched \u200bits full-scale war on Ukraine in February 2022.<\/p>\n
Ukraine has \u200crepeatedly called for a ceasefire after nearly 4-1\/2 years of fighting. Russia says it wants a settlement, but any solution must \u200binvolve Ukraine fully ceding four regions Moscow claims as well as resolving the conflict’s “root causes.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Reuters in Kyiv and Moscow \u200band by Jekater\u012bna Golubkova in Tokyo; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Elaine Hardcastle)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aug 12 (Reuters) – Ukraine hammered Russia’s Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk in a massive overnight drone…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27511,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1138,321,9900,158,5757,25,1967,26,2713,412],"class_list":["post-27510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-black-sea","tag-drone-attack","tag-grain-terminals","tag-kyiv","tag-novorossiysk","tag-russia","tag-telegram","tag-ukraine","tag-ukrainian-city","tag-volodymyr-zelenskiy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}