Ukraine’s largest port is its strongest link to the world economy
, but occasional missile strikes belie any sense of normality. The ornate stone buildings of its historic centre are bolstered by sandbags. Few people venture to the beach for a dip in the Black Sea, which is now heavily mined, and a 10pm curfew keeps the roughly 500,000 residents who have not fled indoors at night. For now the city breathes a sigh of relief; Russia has scaled back the ambition of its invasion and is concentrating on the east. But worse could still come.
Odessa is economically crucial too. Black Sea ports, including Odessa, two others close by and Mykolaiv to the east, handled more than 70% of Ukraine’s exports before the war. Russia’s Black Sea blockade and Ukraine’s defensive mining of its waters have stopped all shipments, including those of wheat, of which Ukraine was the world’s fifth-largest exporter. That has helped to push wheat prices up by more than 50% this year.
Pressure to reopen the Black Sea ports will only grow. A new harvest will begin in around a month, but Ukraine lacks the space to store what it reaps. According to Slawomir Matuszak of the Centre for Eastern Studies, a Warsaw-based think-tank, the coming season will bring in 30m tonnes of crops for export, on top of 20m tonnes already in silos. That adds up to roughly 50 times more than the country exported in the past month.
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