Ukrainian corn delivered to the Black Sea port of Odesa is being bid $26 a tonne below corn delivered to the western rail border, inverting the premium a deep-water terminal normally commands, after Russian attacks on shipping stopped vessels calling at the Greater Odesa ports on 22 July.

Corn for delivery to Odesa fell $8 over the past week to $200 a tonne, according to Spike Brokers, while corn delivered to Chop, the rail crossing into Slovakia and Hungary, was bought at $226, down $6.

"Prices for grain delivered to Odesa are now purely nominal, because there are practically no real purchases there," the brokerage said, adding that the main volumes were moving to Chop instead. Even the softening at Chop "reflects restrained trading activity even on alternative routes", it said.

There is no formal blockade. Serhiy Derkach, first deputy minister for communities and territories, said on 29 July that the ports formally remained open but that ship calls had declined significantly. Traffic had been running at four to five sailings a day in July, according to Ekonomichna Pravda. On 22 July, none entered, and by 30 July the ports association Ukrport said all three Greater Odesa terminals had ceased operations.

Shipowners withdrew on their own account. Russian strikes damaged 28 commercial vessels between 20 June and 20 July and killed 21 seafarers and port workers, according to Odesa prosecutors. The bulk carrier Golden Leo, hit off Odesa on 19 July while loaded with corn, sank a week later; 10 people died. Maersk rerouted its feeder service to Romania, and underwriters have stopped writing new war-risk cover for voyages to Ukrainian ports, according to the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies.

"Shipowners, captains and crews now assess not the level of freight or possible earnings, but first of all the risk to life," said Dmytro Barinov, president of Ukrport.

Corn heaped in the open hold of a bulk carrier at a berth in the port of Odesa, with a loading gantry, a red quayside crane and grain silos behind under a clear sky

The oilseed complex has taken the sharpest markdown. Rapeseed delivered to Ukrainian plants fell $70 a tonne over the past week to $490, sunflower seed $15 to $680 and soybeans $14 to $445, Spike Brokers said. Domestic rapeseed reached its lowest level since November 2024, APK-Inform reported on 27 July, attributing the fall to the difficulty of exporting through the deep-water ports.

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Crushers have stopped bidding rather than bid down. Many plants told APK-Inform they were not buying sunflower seed at all and had no working prices. The reason is not the crush margin. "Because there is no understanding of the future cost of delivering the finished product, most processing plants simultaneously corrected their sunflower purchase prices," Spike Brokers said on 28 July. "Despite a relatively stable crush margin, plants are not ready to build stocks until the mechanism for exporting the oil in the coming weeks becomes clear."

The clearest volume loss so far is in rapeseed. Ukraine exported about 3,800 tonnes in the first 23 days of July against 55,000 tonnes in the same period a year earlier, APK-Inform said, and has raised its estimate of August domestic processing to 200,000-250,000 tonnes from a planned 100,000-150,000 tonnes. Shipments to the EU are heavily seasonal, running at 14,038 tonnes last July before rising to 376,568 tonnes in September, according to Eurostat figures accessed via Cropli. The corridor closed at the front edge of that peak.

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Sunflower oil shows the same split. Purchases for delivery to Black Sea ports have practically stopped, while buyers are bidding $1,320-1,335 a tonne for oil delivered to the Danube ports, Ukraine's Electronic Grain Exchange said on 29 July. Sunflower oil quoted free on board north-west Europe for August shipment was $1,460-1,505 a tonne.

To be sure, the corridor matters less to oil than to grain. Three-quarters of the sunflower oil moved by rail already leaves through western border crossings rather than ports, and 89 per cent of meal and cake does, Ukrzaliznytsia told market participants on 16 July, attributing a 23 per cent fall in July rail oil volumes to a poor oilseed harvest and the repair season at extraction plants rather than to the ports. Fastmarkets put cumulative sunflower-oil export losses from earlier attacks at about 2 per cent of production, with roughly a third of Ukraine's crush capacity idle.

Nor do export volumes yet show the stoppage. Ukraine shipped 198,000 tonnes of sunflower oil in the first 23 days of July against 383,000 tonnes in 28 days of May, Spike Brokers said, but the corridor closed on the 21st. Full-month figures are due this week.

The exposure is not in doubt. Ukraine has supplied 93 per cent of the EU's imported sunflower oil this marketing year, the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service said in April, and its share of EU sunflower-oil import value rose to 45.2 per cent in the first five months of 2026 from 39.6 per cent in 2025, Eurostat data accessed via Cropli show. The overland alternative is constrained for precisely these goods: Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland all still ban Ukrainian oilseed imports.

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Kyiv is preparing loans secured against harvested crops. "Due to the suspension of exports through the ports of Great Odesa, the supply of grain on the domestic market significantly exceeded demand," Taras Vysotskyi, the agriculture minister, said on 1 August, warning that more than 27mn tonnes of agricultural products may go unexported if sea shipments do not resume.

"If the market feels that it has become safer and calmer, the ships will return," Barinov said.