Russian Vessel Returns to Occupied Mariupol Port To Export Ukrainian Grain

The vessel’s identification system was turned off near the port.

The Mezhdurechensk ship, which the Russians use to export grain stolen from Ukrainian farmers, has again called at the port in temporarily occupied Mariupol.

Petro Andriuschenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, announced this 27 June in a statement, the CFTS portal reports.

“The Russians continue to steal our grain by sea. The Mezhdurechensk vessel has entered the port of Mariupol again. Aboard the vessel is reinforced concrete for building fortifications, and our grain will be loaded onto it,” he said.

According to Andriuschenko, the vessel’s identification system was turned off near the port’s waters.

“We are counting how long it will take to load it this time. If the Russians manage to meet the deadline of one or two days, the next ship will leave with military cargo,” he said.

As the CFTS portal reported, 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. “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,” Andriuschenko said in April.

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