Russia Turning Mariupol Railway Station and Port Into Major Hub For Exporting Stolen Grain

Russia will also use it as a military logistics hub.

Russia plans to turn Mariupol into a major logistics hub for exporting grain from the temporarily occupied territories in the Donetsk and Zaporizhia regions. For this, it is demolishing the railway station and rebuilding the seaport.

Petro Andriuschenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, announced this in a statement, the CFTS portal reports.

According to Andriuschenko, the Russians plan to build a major railway hub in Mariupol.

For this, they are dismantling the railway station and nearby houses. The same applies to the seaport: they plan to turn it into a military logistics base that will operate jointly with the railway station for this purpose.

“If they succeed in implementing their plans, they will be able to use it to export grain from the occupied territories in the Donetsk region and Zaporizhia because the Mariupol seaport is one of the largest on the coast of the Sea of Azov. We believe that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will thwart these plans,“ Andriuschenko said.

The CFTS portal reported in February that the Russian occupiers had begun creating a hub in Mariupol. Photographs of the current state of the railway station in Mariupol emerged then.

As reported earlier, the Russians have illegally added the ports of Mariupol and Berdiansk to the Russian Register of Seaports and begun the process of adding a section of the navigable waterways in the Kherson region to the “List of Internal Waterways of the Russian Federation.“

The CFTS portal also reported that the Russians are exporting ore from temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories through the Mariupol seaport.

The Russians seized the Zaporizhia iron ore plant, from which ore is being exported through the Mariupol seaport, almost one year ago.

Entities linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), under the auspices of which the looting of Ukrainian mineral resources is taking place, sell the stolen Ukrainian ore.