Russian forces say they’ve retreated from Urozhaine.
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Ukraine claims that its forces have driven further into the Mokri Yaly River Valley in the south of the country, announcing on Wednesday that they had retaken the tiny village of Urozhaine after Russian forces said they had retreated following more than a week of fighting.
Retaking the village, which is in the Donetsk region, means that Ukraine now holds positions on both banks of the Mokri Yaly River, opening up more options as its forces try to advance on Russian strongholds farther south. But the fact that progress in Kyiv’s long-anticipated counteroffensive is now measured by the recapture of small villages reinforces how difficult the fighting has become.
“Urozhaine has been liberated,” Hanna Malyar, Ukraine’s deputy minister of defense, said in a statement on Wednesday morning, one day after Russian forces and officials said they had been forced to retreat from the village.
“We lost Urozhaine,” the Russian Vostok battalion, which took part in the battle, said in a statement on Tuesday. The claims were not independently verified.
Each side claims to have inflicted deep losses on the other during heavy fighting, but neither offered an accounting of its own losses. The village, which had a population of under 1,000 before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has been left in ruins by fighting. Urozhaine is the first village known to be recaptured by Kyiv’s forces since they reclaimed Staromaiorske in late July.
Ukraine’s ultimate goal is to reach the Sea of Azov and drive a wedge into the so-called land bridge between Russia and Crimea, a link that is vital to the Russian military’s supply routes to the west. If Ukrainian forces can drive deep enough into Russian-controlled territory to put Moscow’s supply lines at risk of direct artillery fire, they hope to make Russia’s defensive positions untenable.
Ukrainian forces now have several options for where to try concentrating their forces. They could attempt to push around the Russian-held village of Staromlynivka, about four miles south of Urozhaine, as they press to the southwest toward Berdiansk.
Or they could direct their offensive to the southeast, toward Mariupol, if it appears to present a better opportunity. Both Mariupol and Berdiansk are major port cities more than 50 miles away on the Sea of Azov.
Yet Russian forces control scores of small villages along both routes, making swift Ukrainian advances unlikely. The pace of the offensive has been slowed at every step by vast minefields, Russian attack aircraft and dug-in Russian forces.
Russia’s Vostok battalion said that after penetrating its defenses, the Ukrainians were driving to the east, toward the village of Oktyabrskoye. “About seven units of armored vehicles, accompanied by infantry, are trying to find a new promising direction,” the battalion said.
The claim could not be verified, and Ukraine’s military maintained silence about the movements of its soldiers.
Col. Petro Chernyk, speaking at a news briefing by the Ukrainian military on Tuesday, said the Russians had set up formidable defenses across southern Ukraine, with the first line covered by vast minefields stretching across miles, a second line with artillery and concentrations of troops, and a third line of rear positions meant to preserve resources.
Andriy Kovalev, a spokesman for the Ukrainian military’s general staff, said on Wednesday that the country’s forces also continued to make small gains along a second line of attack in southern Ukraine, pressing on Russian defensive lines around the town of Robotyne, about 50 miles north of Melitopol, a vital transit hub near the coast.
But Ukrainian forces were on the defense in the east. The commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, Oleksandr Syrsky, acknowledged in a Telegram post that defending against Russia’s mounting offensive in northeastern Ukraine around the city of Kupiansk has been difficult.
Moscow’s troops have been trying to break through Ukrainian lines every day, he said, with the aim of capturing the city. He added that defending Ukrainian positions near Bahkmut, the site of the war’s longest and bloodiest battle, has also been a struggle, though maintained Ukrainian troops are holding the line and gradually moving forward.
A correction was made on
Aug. 17, 2023
:
An earlier version of this article misstated options for the potential direction of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Ukrainian forces could push southwest toward Berdiansk or southeast toward Mariupol, not the other way around.
How we handle corrections
— Marc Santora
A cargo ship travels from the port of Odesa in a test of Ukraine’s new Black Sea corridor.
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A civilian cargo ship that has been stuck in Odesa since the start of the war set off early Wednesday morning, becoming the first to venture out of the port into the turbulent waters of the Black Sea since Moscow threatened all ships moving to and from Ukraine.
The move is part of Ukrainian efforts to restore seaport traffic despite a de facto Russian blockade. Kyiv’s efforts to resume exports of grain and other goods raise the stakes for Ukraine’s allies, as an attack or other episode could draw other nations whose ships travel the waters into the conflict.
Establishing a safe path for the small number of internationally flagged ships stranded in Ukrainian ports for 18 months would mark a milestone, but Ukraine also hopes it will be a demonstration that Russia does not dominate the sea and that shipping to Ukrainian seaports can be resumed.
“The fact that the first ship left the port is a little victory for Ukraine,” said Andriy Klymenko, the director of the Institute for Strategic Black Sea Studies, a Ukrainian research organization. “Let the first one be a lucky one.”
The nearly 1,000-foot-long container ship Joseph Schulte, which flies under the flag of Hong Kong and has been stranded in Odesa since arriving there the day before Russia launched its full-scale invasion some 18 months ago, set a course to Istanbul using a corridor in Ukrainian territorial waters established by the Ukrainian ministry of infrastructure for civilian vessels.
In establishing the corridor, the Ukrainian navy said that it could assure ships safe passage through a maze of maritime mines they have installed to protect the Ukrainian coast. But it could offer no assurances of protection from Russian mines and warships.
Once they leave Ukrainian waters, ships would be able to chart a course to Turkey within the national waters of Romania and Bulgaria, which are members of NATO and under the alliance’s protection.
Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, a company with headquarters in Germany that owns the ship in partnership with a Chinese bank, said in a statement that all the crew was safe as it departed Ukraine with 2,000 containers full of goods on board. It is not clear exactly what the ship is carrying, but it was not designed to carry grain.
The movement of the ship is being tracked in real time by maritime monitoring services. By early afternoon it was moving from Ukrainian waters toward Romanian coastal waters.
The last time a civilian ship left a Ukrainian seaport through the Black Sea was on July 16, the day before the Kremlin suspended its participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative, an internationally brokered deal that allowed tens of millions of tons of Ukrainian grain to be exported.
Since then, the Black Sea has become a cauldron of military and geopolitical tensions. Russia has launched sustained attacks on both Ukrainian ports and grain infrastructure.
Ukrainian and Western officials have accused Moscow of trying to intimidate international shipping companies from traveling to Ukrainian ports through threats and provocations. This weekend, Russia for the first time forcibly intercepted and boarded a civilian ship traveling to a Ukrainian port. Analysts said the ship, the Sukru Okan, was in international waters.
The Russians “are testing the ambition of the NATO bloc itself, how far they can go in their provocations,” Col. Petro Chernyk, an analyst in the Ukrainian military, told a news conference after the episode.
Russia has maintained a de facto naval blockade on Ukraine’s seaports since the start of the war, though it allowed a limited number of ships to participate in the effort to export grain for about a year. Kyiv has been able to use small ports on the Danube River as a lifeline to export grain and other goods.
The first step in demonstrating the safety of the new corridor, Ukrainian officials said, would be to enable a handful of ships stuck in the Ukrainian ports of Chornomorsk, Odesa, and Pivdennyi to leave.
Dozens of ships stranded at ports in Mykolaiv and Kherson ports would remain there as the route for them to exit the Dnipro River delta was too dangerous for navigation.
— Marc Santora
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Ukraine faces obstacles if it tries to use Odesa’s port as a grain export route, experts say.
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Ukraine would face formidable obstacles if it sought to revive Odesa as an export route for its grain across the Black Sea, not least among them Russia’s frequent bombardment of the city’s port, grain and shipping experts said on Wednesday.
Their view dampens optimism over the departure on Wednesday of a container ship from the Ukrainian port of Odesa bound for Turkey. The ship, the Joseph Schulte, charted a course to the southwest, along Ukraine’s coast and into the coastal waters of Romania, heading for Bulgarian waters. Both countries are NATO members, as is Turkey, and the route could enable the ship to stay out of the more northern international waters of the Black Sea, where Russia’s Navy is dominant.
The Joseph Schulte is the first commercial ship to leave from Odesa since mid-July, when Russia terminated an international deal that had allowed Ukraine to export its grain across the Black Sea. Moscow subsequently said it would consider any ship approaching Ukrainian waters to be potentially carrying military cargo.
Andrey Sizov, the head of SovEcon, a Black Sea grain markets consultancy, called Wednesday’s sailing a “very small first step,” but he said that unless the Kremlin guaranteed safe passage, it was highly unlikely that Odesa could be made viable as a wartime export route because of the risks ships face while in Ukrainian waters.
“I doubt that at this stage anyone would dare to trade at Odesa, and vessel owners would not send their ships there,” he said. The Joseph Schulte, which had been stuck in the port since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February of last year, is partly owned by a Chinese company and is not a grain ship. It left port carrying 2,000 containers loaded with unspecified goods.
Several shipping companies said in recent days that they had ceased sailing to Ukraine and Russia altogether, given the escalation of tensions in the Black Sea.
In a measure of those tensions, the Russian navy on Sunday fired warning shots to halt a cargo vessel in the Black Sea and then sent armed officers on board to inspect it. Russia also struck at the port of Odesa overnight, along with some of Ukraine’s Danube River ports, which have also been frequently targeted in recent weeks.
“You would have to have a good reason to take a ship into a port that is being bombed,” said Mike Lee, a specialist in Black Sea agricultural projects at Green Square Agro Consulting in Britain. “My feeling is that it would seem too risky.”
On Wednesday, the ship-tracking platform MarineTraffic showed dozens of ships at anchor off the Romanian port of Sulina, some waiting to enter a canal that leads to Ukraine’s Danube River ports.
— Matthew Mpoke Bigg
Ukrainian grain facilities along the Danube are targeted once more in drone attacks.
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Russian forces attacked Ukrainian ports on the Danube River with drones early Wednesday, damaging granaries and warehouses that are used to export grain, according to Ukrainian officials and the Defense Ministry of neighboring Romania.
The ministry condemned the attacks, on the ports of Reni and Izmail — Ukraine’s two main ports on the Danube, which lie just across the water from Romania.
Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, said Russian drones had struck two hangar-type warehouses in the port of Reni in the Odesa region. No one was injured, he said.
Ukraine’s Air Force said it had shot down 13 drones in the Odesa and Mykolaiv regions, primarily aimed at port infrastructure, but did not detail how many got through or whether the damage had been caused by the debris of intercepted drones.
A series of attacks along the Danube in recent weeks have caused alarm, in part because of the proximity of some of the ports to Romania, a NATO member.
The Danube delta became an immediate alternative waterway for grain ships after Russia resumed its blockade last month of major Ukrainian ports along the Black Sea. But Russia soon began attacking the smaller ports on the Danube as well, bombing Ukrainian grain-loading facilities there.
On Wednesday, the United States condemned the repeated attacks. “It is unacceptable,” Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesmen, told reporters at a news briefing in Washington. “Putin simply does not care about global food security.”
On Sunday, Russian forces fired warning shots before boarding a commercial vessel heading to a Ukrainian port on the Danube, further increasing tensions around the Black Sea and continuing efforts to choke off Ukraine’s food exports.
Separately on Wednesday morning, three drones were shot down by air defenses in the Kaluga region of Russia, immediately to the southwest of the Moscow region, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. The ministry said that Ukraine was behind the attack, but that claim could not immediately be verified independently.
There have been more than a dozen attempted drone assaults in and around Moscow since May.
— Victoria Kim
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With Russia’s focus on the war, a disputed Caucasus region edges closer to disaster.
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The United Nations Security Council convened an emergency meeting on Wednesday over deteriorating conditions in Nagorno-Karabakh, a long-disputed region contested by two former Soviet nations where Russia’s hand has lightened as the Kremlin focuses on the war in Ukraine.
Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave within Azerbaijan, is home to thousands of ethnic Armenians, and has been a point of tension and fighting since the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago reshaped power dynamics throughout its former empire. Armenia has remained far more closely allied with Russia than its neighbor, Azerbaijan, and the two have been at war repeatedly over the enclave.
The emergency meeting on Wednesday was requested by Armenia, whose U.N. ambassador warned that the region was on “the verge of a full-fledged humanitarian catastrophe” because of an Azerbaijani blockade of a crucial supply road, known as the Lachin Corridor, connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.
In a letter to the Security Council, Armenia accused Azerbaijan of preventing civilians and supply trucks from passing through the corridor, and of blocking the flow of electricity and natural gas to Nagorno-Karabakh. Children are “struggling from malnutrition and lack of food,” Ararat Mirzoyan, Armenia’s minister of foreign affairs, said during the emergency meeting.
Armenia says Azerbaijan engineered protests last year, after a flare-up in fighting, that blocked access to the corridor. This spring, Azerbaijan set up a checkpoint on the passage, leading Armenia to call on Russia, which has troops patrolling the corridor as part of a 2020 peace deal that ended a six-week war over control of the territory, to remove the Azerbaijani forces from the “illegal blockade.” Russia’s intervention helped end that conflict, but now its hands are full with Ukraine. Talks this summer mediated by the United States, the European Union and Russia failed to achieve a resolution.
Azerbaijan contends that Armenia has resisted efforts to find a diplomatic solution over the Lachin Corridor. In a statement, the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused Armenia of trying to “instrumentalize the U.N. Security Council for its political, military and informational manipulation campaign.”
A representative for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Edem Wosornu, said that the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only international humanitarian organization that has access to Nagorno-Karabakh, had not been able to deliver food since June 14 or medicine since July 7.
The Security Council delegate from France said that Azerbaijan had “no legitimate reason” for blocking passage through the corridor and called for “unconditional and immediate restoration of movement.”
— Valeriya Safronova
New U.S. sanctions target Russia-North Korea arms deals.
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The United States imposed a new set of measures on Wednesday cracking down on what it said was a sanctions-evading network that supports arms deals between North Korea and Russia, whose stockpiles of military hardware have been sapped by the war in Ukraine.
The Treasury Department issued new sanctions against three companies — Versor, Versus, and Defense Engineering — that it said had tried to organize deals to transfer over two dozen kinds of weapons and munitions to Russia in exchange for raw materials and commodities for North Korea.
The Biden administration had already imposed sanctions in March against Ashot Mkrtychev, a Slovakian citizen who founded or leads the three companies.
“Alongside our allies and partners, we remain committed to exposing and disrupting the arms trade underpinning Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine,” Brian E. Nelson, the Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement.
Under the sanctions, no U.S. citizens or companies will be allowed to have dealings with the companies, and their holdings in the United States will be blocked from doing business and must be reported to the American authorities. It was not immediately clear how many holdings the companies have in the United States.
For months, Washington has accused North Korea of shipping weapons and ammunition to Russia, shoring up Moscow’s war effort. Both Moscow and Pyongyang have denied the charge, but they have extensive ties. North Korea imports and uses Russian military equipment and has backed Russia in the war in Ukraine.
Last month, Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, visited North Korea to attend a military parade and met with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, who vowed to expand military cooperation with Russia and identified the United States as a common enemy.
On Tuesday, Pyongyang’s state media agency KCNA sent a similar message, reporting that Mr. Kim had exchanged letters with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and had pledged “military friendship and solidarity” as the two countries develop their “longstanding strategic relationship.”
KCNA said that Mr. Putin had sent a message back to Mr. Kim, extending congratulations on the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945 and praising the “good neighborly relationships” between the two countries today.
In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Vedant Patel, said on Tuesday that the United States remained “deeply concerned” over potential weapons shipments from North Korea to Russia. “Any kind of security cooperation or arms deal between North Korea and Russia would certainly violate a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions,” he said.
— Gaya Gupta
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Germany agonizes over supplying Ukraine with another advanced weapon.
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Germany is hesitating about supplying its long-range cruise missile, the Taurus, to Ukraine.
The Taurus is similar to the Anglo-French air-launched cruise missile called Storm Shadow or Scalp, but flies at a low altitude, to avoid detection, while the others fly at high altitude. It has a range of over 300 miles and can fly as low as about 115 feet from the ground.
But as with the debate that preceded the decision early this year to supply Leopard tanks to Ukraine, the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz is reluctant to provide weapons that could be seen as escalatory or that could hit targets in Russia.
Instead, the government is talking with the manufacturer about programming changes to limit the range of the Taurus, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported. In this debate, too, Mr. Scholz seems to be following the line of President Biden, who has declined to supply Ukraine with longer-range ATACMS missiles for the same reason, even though the range of the ATACMS is considerably shorter, about 185 miles.
It was only when Mr. Biden reluctantly agreed in January to supply Abrams tanks to Ukraine, for example, that Mr. Scholz was willing to greenlight the Leopards in what was presented as a joint statement. Mr. Scholz has repeatedly said that Germany will move “in lock step” with its main NATO ally, the United States.
On Friday, a German government spokesman said there was “no new information” on the status of potential Taurus missile deliveries to Ukraine, saying that “Germany is focusing on heavy artillery, armored vehicles and air defense systems. There is no new information on the Taurus cruise missile.” That official position had not changed as of Wednesday.
The main opposition party, the Christian Democrats, has urged Mr. Scholz to send the Taurus to Ukraine. Norbert Röttgen, a senior lawmaker in the party, said that delivery of the Taurus was “morally and politically urgent.” To refuse Ukraine the missile, he said, “in contrast to France and Great Britain — is completely incomprehensible and irresponsible.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, told Germany’s Bild newspaper that the Taurus missiles were “crucial” to Ukraine’s efforts to fight off Russia. Seeking to ease concerns about the long reach of the weapons, Mr. Podolyak said they would be used “exclusively on the territory of Ukraine, within the internationally recognized borders of 1991,” which of course includes Crimea, the peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
In general, Mr. Scholz has developed a reputation for hesitancy over military support for Ukraine and reluctance to push Russia too far into a corner. Nonetheless, Germany has provided Ukraine with sizable financial and military aid. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks support for Ukraine, Germany is now the largest supplier of military aid to Ukraine after the United States.
Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who leads the Free Democrats, a member of Germany’s three-party coalition government, was in Ukraine on Monday and promised, “We stand by Ukraine’s side, shoulder to shoulder.”
He noted that since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Germany has provided Ukraine with humanitarian, financial and military aid totaling about 22 billion euros, or $24 billion.
This week, the government pledged a total of €5.4 billion in military aid to Ukraine this year and another €10.5 billion by 2027, a major commitment that requires parliamentary approval.
— Steven Erlanger reporting from Berlin
New ads push Republicans to support Ukraine before a critical vote in Congress.
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A conservative group started a $2 million advertising campaign on Tuesday to build support among Republican voters for arming and aiding Ukraine in its war against Russia, as Congress gears up for a bitter fight over President Biden’s latest request for funding to keep the assistance flowing.
The Republicans for Ukraine campaign centers on a 30-second advertisem*nt. It features a series of testimonials from G.O.P. voters bemoaning that the party has not done more to help Kyiv beat back Russian aggression and decrying what they identify as sentiments of support for Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, by certain Republican operatives. The ads were paid for by Defending Democracy Together, an organization founded by the conservative commentator William Kristol, and are expected to be broadcast on Fox News during next week’s Republican presidential primary debate. Billboards displaying snippets of individual testimonials are also being put up around Milwaukee, which is hosting the debate, and in New York’s Times Square.
“I’m a Republican. I support Ukraine. G.O.P.: Stand up to Putin,” reads one billboard featuring the words and face of Mike Beverly, identified as a Republican voter.
The ads are being unveiled just days after the Biden administration appealed to Congress to approve an additional $24 billion in aid for Ukraine — $13 billion of which would be dedicated to military assistance. That amount is on top of the $113 billion that lawmakers have budgeted for the war effort to date. But the new request faces mounting hurdles, particularly with an increasing number of Republicans in Congress and in the electorate expressing skepticism or outright hostility toward the idea of sending more military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine.
In June, the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, under pressure from right-wing hard-liners bent on slashing federal spending and who are generally opposed to the Ukraine war effort, said he was against appropriating supplemental funds for Kyiv. Then last month, a third of House Republicans voted to prohibit the administration from sending any more security assistance to Ukraine, and over 40 percent of the House G.O.P. voted to strike $300 million in funding for Ukraine from the annual defense bill. Since then, a CNN poll found that 71 percent of Republicans believe Congress should not authorize any additional funding for Ukraine.
The G.O.P. presidential primary field is also split on Ukraine aid. The front-runners, former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, have expressed opposition to continuing to send military and humanitarian assistance to Kyiv; candidates like former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, have urged support.
The Republicans for Ukraine campaign is seeking to close that gap.
“Too many of the party’s leaders seem to think there’s no penalty to be paid for standing against Ukrainian democracy and America’s role in supporting the fight for freedom,” Gunner Ramer, national spokesman for Republicans for Ukraine, said in a statement. “We’re here to remind them that there are a lot of Republicans across the country who stand with Ukraine.”
A correction was made on
Aug. 18, 2023
:
An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of funding allotted to Ukraine in a defense bill. It is $300 million, not $300 billion.
How we handle corrections
— Karoun Demirjian reporting from Washington
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Ukraine plans to fortify defenses along its northeastern borders with Russia and Belarus.
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Ukraine will spend nearly $35 million to strengthen its lines of defense in two regions that border Russia and its closest ally, Belarus, the Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said on Tuesday.
The funding for “military engineering and fortification facilities” was requested by the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine and the Chernihiv region in northern Ukraine, Mr. Shmyhal said, adding that the construction would strengthen the country’s security and defense capability. He did not provide further details on the plans.
Kharkiv is one of the most embattled regions of Ukraine. Russian forces waging a fierce offensive there have advanced in recent days, prompting fears among civilians in the city of Kupiansk — only 25 miles from the Russian border — that a second occupation could be coming.
“Our border region suffers from constant shelling by the occupiers every day,” the head of the Kharkiv regional administration, Oleg Sinegubov, said in a statement thanking the Ukrainian government for the funding. Heavy Russian attacks across the region on Tuesday killed one person and injured at least nine others, he said.
The Chernihiv region to the north faces another threat: It lies directly along the land route Russian forces used in February 2022 to launch their invasion from Belarus and press toward Kyiv.
The commander of Ukraine’s joint forces, Lt. Gen. Serhiy Nayev, reported several attempts by Russian sabotage groups to cross the border into the Chernihiv region in recent weeks, including on Tuesday. His claims could not be independently verified.
— Anushka Patil
‘Stop machine!’ A video shows Russian naval officers halting a cargo ship on the Black Sea.
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Russia’s Ministry of Defense released a video on Tuesday that shows part of a naval operation in which military personnel landed by helicopter on a cargo ship on the Black Sea, in an inspection that Ukraine has condemned as illegal.
The video, the second to emerge since the Sunday episode, has been verified by The New York Times. It appears to have been shot by Russian forces, in part from a head-mounted camera.
“Stop machine! Stop machine!” a Russian officer, machine gun pointed, shouts in English at crew members as he walks through an open door onto the bridge of the cargo ship, the Sukru Okan. “Keep calm and listen to me.”
In the video, three crew members on the bridge stand with their hands on their heads. One leans over and presses a button on the ship’s control panel, apparently to comply with the Russian’s order by cutting the ship’s engines. The three men follow orders to sit, dropping to their knees.
“Good day, sir,” the Russian officer says to a man in jeans and a T-shirt, who has identified himself as the ship’s captain. “I am a Russian Navy officer. My actions will be recorded on video.” He orders the captain to speak in English, the main language of international shipping. None of the people shown in the video are identified by name.
The Russian officer then demands to know why the ship had not stopped, pointing at a radio, apparently to indicate that a command to halt had been sent. The captain, speaking in halting English, replies “bad understand.” He appears to be blaming the ship’s chief engineer, who he says has been in the engine room rather than on the bridge, for not complying with his order to halt.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense said on Sunday that its personnel had fired warning shots to get the ship to stop before the navy helicopter landed, but that part of the episode is not recorded on either of the two videos. The videos provide the only visual evidence of the Russian operation, and it was not possible to determine the full scope of what took place.
The earlier video, which was posted on Monday by military bloggers in Russia and news organizations and has been verified by The New York Times, shows a Russian helicopter approaching the vessel and the ship’s crew sitting on deck in a position of surrender. The Sukru Okan sails under the flag of Palau, an island country in the western Pacific, but is owned and managed by a Turkish company, according to the shipping database Equasis.
The forced inspection is apparently the first since Russia declined last month to extend a deal allowing Ukraine to export its grain across the Black Sea. Since then, tensions have risen sharply in the Black Sea, one theater of the war in Ukraine.
Russian attacks and the pressure on shipping aim to sharply curtail Ukraine’s ability to export its grain and other food crops, said Alexis Ellender, a global analyst at Kpler, a commodities analytics firm.
Mr. Ellender said that it appeared unlikely that Moscow would restore the Black Sea grain deal. In its absence, Ukraine has sought alternative export routes including its Danube River ports, but Russia launched strikes against two of those ports in recent weeks. Sunday’s incident could raise shipping insurance premiums and freight costs but shippers were unlikely to be deterred, Mr. Ellender said.
It was not immediately possible to speak with the Sukru Okan’s captain or the ship’s owner. The ship had been bound for the Ukrainian river port of Izmail, according to Kyiv and Moscow, but for the last 24 hours it has stood off the coast of the Romanian Danube River port of Sulina, according to the Marine Traffic website.
Jenny Gross contributed reporting.
— Matthew Mpoke Bigg
