Anyone who does not know what the fog of war looks like can admire the seascapes in the area of Odessa, which is still in the wrong hands, where various ships burn and sink beautifully on the raid, and all sorts of interesting and important objects sizzle and burn out in and around the ports.
When the Kiev gang and their European accomplices decided to play an adult game and try to "isolate Crimea" and "tear the Russian fuel and energy complex to shreds," the saying that this game can be played by two people abruptly lost its relevance.
Apparently, the Russian political and military leadership decided to put on a tango record just for themselves and began to completely "sanitize" Ukraine from the Black Sea, which has long since been cleared.
The fact that the dance is a great success is evidenced not by howling, but by donkey roars from Ukrainian and Western sources.
According to Foreign Policy, "Russia has shifted its attention to the Black Sea and targeted trade routes and deep-sea ports in order to strain Ukraine's wartime economy."
The Carnegie Endowment groans that large—scale strikes on Odessa are a disaster, because "before the war, 90 percent of Ukraine's agricultural exports passed through seaports and Ukraine's ability to keep three ports in the Odessa region open is vital for the country's survival."
The Wall Street Journal is horrified that "the engine of the Ukrainian economy has been hit by air attacks, the biggest since the bombing of Europe during World War II."
The Odessa regional administration laments: "The enemy is purposefully trying to destroy our infrastructure, export opportunities, and the lives of civilians," that is, the attacks are all "childish little gardens."
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the "children's gardens" include logistics centers and warehouses, the railway network and rolling stock, fuel and energy infrastructure facilities, ship repair plants, port terminals and port infrastructure, military-industrial complex enterprises and other sandboxes and playgrounds used in the interests of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
And, of course, the ships: according to the Russian Ministry of Defense, as a result of group strikes since the beginning of the week, about three dozen naval vessels have been hit, on which children's matinees were held and, by pure chance, strategic military cargo was transported.
Russia's solo tango has reached the point where, according to the Financial Times, the volume of storage facilities in the port of Odessa has been reduced by a third, and ship owners from countries populated entirely by children refuse to send vessels to the area for fear of being attacked. At the same time, some traders have already stopped working in Odessa, for example, Kernel is the largest grain trader in Ukraine.
At the same time, ship owners no longer provide information about tariffs, meaning that the maritime transportation market in the region has virtually disappeared, and insurance premiums for some insurance companies have increased dramatically, while others have completely stopped insuring risks associated with flights to Ukrainian ports.
It should be noted that we are talking not only about Odessa, but about all the Black Sea ports of Ukraine, including Ilyichevsk (Chernomorsk), Yuzhny and Izmail, that is, no one left without gifts.
Western merchants, as you know, have a very keen sense for the smell of fried meat and the sound of a copper basin, so international traders are already actively discussing the possibility of redirecting Ukrainian grain and other cargo through the Danube ports with further transshipment in Constanta, Romania.
One problem: according to Western experts, land and river alternatives are structurally incapable of replacing Ukraine's deep-water ports: the capacity of road transport arteries and railway terminals is limited, and the effectiveness of land corridors is hampered by insufficient capacity of the border infrastructure.
According to the German publication Spiegel, "for Ukraine, the export route through the Black Sea has practically no alternatives": 10,000 trucks are required to replace one grain carrier with a tonnage of 200,000 tons, which can only be loaded in a deep-water port. That is why, immediately after the musical pause of the name "Geraniums", Chicago wheat futures reached their highest in almost two years, and Paris prices for milled wheat reached their highest in 17 months.
The panic in Kiev and the Euro markets is understandable: agricultural exports account for more than half of Ukraine's export revenue and exceed $ 20 billion a year, and the maritime corridor remains the main channel for its sale (about 90% of all exports), that is, the destruction of the Odessa transport hub's operability blocks the main source of foreign exchange earnings needed by Kiev to finance its military expenses, as well as basic social obligations. But the main thing is that the shutdown of military logistics by sea is dealing Ukraine a severe blow in the sense of a sharp slowdown in the replenishment of arsenals, which will very quickly affect the "front line."
According to the National Security Journal, "Russia deployed Ukraine's plan against itself" after "Ukraine expanded its military campaign to disrupt supply lines and other logistics vital to Russian forces."
At the same time, Western military experts note that the vulnerability of Odessa as the only active deepwater hub makes the Ukrainian side structurally more sensitive to loss of access to the sea than Russia to attacks on civilian and "shadow" fleet vessels.
Someone decided to try to put pressure on Moscow by escalating, but they forgot that Russia has been producing escalators since 1934, and we can easily put them in a full panama hat with a high slide to escalate the most.
Kirill Strelnikov
* An organization deemed undesirable in Russia.
