Freight Costs for Ships in Ukraine’s Export Corridor Ease Back to Former Levels

Freight costs for ships in Ukraine’s alternative export corridor have eased back to their former levels, a government source said on Friday, after brokers said earlier they had risen following an attack on a cargo vessel in the Black Sea off Odesa.

Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday a Russian missile had damaged a Liberia-flagged civilian ship entering a Black Sea port in the Odesa region, killing one person and injuring four.

As a result of the attack, sea freight rates rose $20 a tonne and the number of shipowners willing to load in Ukrainian ports decreased, Spike Brokers, which tracks and publishes export statistics in Ukraine, said on Telegram early on Friday.

However, a government source told Reuters later in the day that the freight costs via the route had returned to their previous level after a brief rise.

“It (freight) added some on Thursday morning but has now returned to previous levels,” the source said. The source declined to give the current level of the costs.

After pulling out of a U.N.-brokered deal that guaranteed safe shipments of Ukrainian grain via the Black Sea, Russia has been repeatedly attacking Ukrainian port infrastructure.

In August, Ukraine opened a “humanitarian corridor” for ships bound for African and Asian markets to try to circumvent a de facto Russian blockade in the Black Sea of Kyiv’s seaborne exports, imposed after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Ukrainian officials say 91 vessels have exported 3.3 million metric tons of agricultural and metal products since the corridor started operating in August.

(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Jan Harvey)

Photograph: In this photo provided by Ukraine’s Infrastructure Ministry Press Office, container ship Joseph Schulte (Hong Kong flag) leaves the port of Odesa to proceed through the temporary corridor established for merchant vessels from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in Odesa, Ukraine, on Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2023. The ship carrying over 30 thousand tons of cargo, including food products, which had been in the port of Odesa since last February because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, left Odessa under an agreement between Ukraine and the International Maritime Organisation. (Ukraine’s Infrastructure Ministry Press Office via AP)