Ship With Disabled Transponder Enters Occupied Mariupol Port to Load Ukrainian Grain

The Mezhdurechensk ship has moored at a pier, waiting for grain to be delivered for loading.

A vessel has once again entered the port of temporarily occupied Mariupol to load grain stolen from Ukrainian farmers.

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

“The Mezhdurechensk vessel has moored at a pier, waiting for grain to be delivered for loading. The vessel’s identification system is off,” he said.

Andriuschenko added that it takes more than a day and a half to get to Mariupol from Rostov, despite all the loud statements.

“The unloading over a period of over two days (the cargo is approximately 1,500 tons) is very slow. It means that the port is far from being fully operational,” he said.

As reported previously, the Russians recently loaded 3,500 tons of grain stolen from Ukrainian farmers onto a Russian ship in the Mariupol seaport. The loading of the ship took about one week, which indicated that the port’s operating efficiency was low.

Andriuschenko wrote on 11 May that the vessel that the Russian occupiers used to transport the first batch of stolen grain from Mariupol had been identified. According to him, it is the Mezhdurechensk vessel, which is a river/sea vessel built in 1966. Its home port is Rostov-on-Don. The ship left its home port on 29 April and returned to Rostov from Mariupol with the grain on 8 May.

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.

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.”

As the CFTS portal previously reported, the Russians are exporting ore from temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories through the Mariupol seaport.