Russia attacked the Odesa region for the second consecutive night after quitting on Monday a year-old deal allowing the safe passage of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea, a decision that prompted the United Nations to warn it risked creating hunger around the world.

Ukraine, which wants to try to continue Black Sea grain shipments vital to global food supplies, said on Wednesday it was setting up a temporary shipping route via Romania.

“Russian terrorists absolutely deliberately targeted the infrastructure of the grain deal,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app. “Every Russian missile — is a strike not only on Ukraine but on everyone in the world who wants normal and safe life.”

Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office said 10 civilians, including a nine-year-old boy, were wounded. Grains terminals were damaged as well as an industrial facility, warehouses, shopping malls, residential and administrative buildings and cars.

Flames and smoke rose from shattered warehouses in video released by the emergencies ministry, which also showed a residential block with shattered windows.

Russia on Wednesday said it would consider all ships travelling to Ukraine’s Black Sea ports as potential carriers of military cargoes from midnight Moscow time following the end of the grain deal.

Russia’s defence ministry said flag states of ships travelling to Ukrainian ports would be considered parties to the conflict on the Ukrainian side. The ministry did not say what actions it might take. It said Russia was also declaring southeastern and northwestern parts of the Black Sea’s international waters to be temporarily unsafe for navigation.

The International Monetary Fund on Wednesday said Russia’s exit from the deal threatens to increase global food insecurity and could raise food prices, especially in poor countries. In Chicago, U.S. wheat prices soared on the latest developments in the war.

President Vladimir Putin said Western nations had “completely distorted” the expired deal, but said Russia would immediately return to it if all its conditions for doing so were met.

‘Mass revenge strike’

On Tuesday, Russia said it had hit military targets in two Ukrainian port cities overnight as “a mass revenge strike” for a blast that damaged its bridge to Crimea, the peninsula it seized from Ukraine in 2014.

Ukraine’s air force said on Wednesday 63 missiles and drones had been launched across the country by Russia, mainly focused on infrastructure and military facilities in the Odesa region.

Air defences had shot down 37 of them, it said, a lower proportion than it has usually reported over months of attacks.

A considerable part of the grain export infrastructure at Chornomorsk port southwest of Odesa was damaged, Agriculture Minister Mykola Solsky said, adding that 60,000 tons of grain had been destroyed.

The attack was “very powerful, truly massive,” Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesperson for the Odesa military administration, said in a voice message on his Telegram channel on Wednesday.

“It was a hellish night,” he said.

Ukraine’s southern military command said Russia had used supersonic missiles, including the Kh-22 that was designed to take out aircraft carriers, to hit Odesa’s port infrastructure.

Crimea fire

The Odesa region’s three ports were the only ones operating in Ukraine during the war under the UN-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative that allowed Ukrainian grain exports through a Russian blockade of Ukraine’s ports.

In Crimea a fire at a military training ground in the Kirovske district forced the evacuation of more than 2,000 people from four settlements, said Russian-installed Crimea governor Sergei Aksyonov, who did not give a reason for the blaze.

Telegram channels linked to Russian security services and Ukrainian media said an ammunition depot was on fire at the base after a Ukrainian overnight air attack.

Odesa’s military administration spokesman Bratchuk posted two videos of a fire in an uninhabited area, saying, “Enemy ammunition depot. Staryi Krym.”

Staryi Krym is a small town in Crimea’s Kirovske district.

Ukrainian forces launched a counteroffensive last month to try to drive Russian forces out of its south and east, where they have dug in along a heavily-fortified front line after failing to capture Kyiv in the early days of the invasion.

UN works on ideas for grain exports

In Washington, the Pentagon announced additional security assistance for Ukraine, totalling about US$1.3 billion, with the package including air defence capabilities and munitions.

The United Nations has said there were a “number of ideas being floated” to help get Ukrainian grain and Russian grain and fertilizer to global markets.

The Black Sea deal was brokered by the U.N. and Turkey in July last year to combat a global food crisis worsened by Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The two countries are among the world’s top grain exporters.

Russia says it could return to the grain deal, but only if its demands are met for rules to be eased for its own exports of food and fertilizer. Western countries call that an attempt to use leverage over food supplies to force a weakening in financial sanctions, which already allow Russia to sell food.

— Reporting for Reuters by Max Hunder and Olena Harmash; additional reporting by Gleb Garanich and Valentyn Ogirenko in Kyiv, Jonathan Saul in London, Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Ron Popeski in Winnipeg; writing by Lidia Kelly and Philippa Fletcher, and William Maclean.

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The accord crowned two months of talks brokered by the United Nations and Turkey, a NATO member that has good relations with both Russia and Ukraine and controls the straits leading into the Black Sea.

Speaking at the signing ceremony in Istanbul, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the deal opens the way to significant volumes of commercial food exports from three key Ukrainian ports: Odesa, Chernomorsk and Yuzhny.

“Today, there is a beacon on the Black Sea. A beacon of hope…, possibility…and relief in a world that needs it more than ever,” Guterres told the gathering.

But fighting raged on unabated in Ukraine’s east and, underlining the enmity and mistrust driving the worst conflict in Europe since the Second World War, Russian and Ukrainian representatives declined to sit at the same table and avoided shaking hands at the ceremony.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy doused hopes that the accord might nudge the conflict nearer a resolution, signalling in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that Kyiv had little appetite for an early ceasefire.

A blockade of Ukrainian ports by Russia’s Black Sea fleet, trapping tens of millions of tonnes of grain in silos and stranding many ships, has worsened global supply chain bottlenecks and, along with sweeping Western sanctions, stoked galloping inflation in food and energy prices around the world.

Moscow has denied responsibility for the worsening food crisis, blaming instead sanctions for slowing its own food and fertilizer exports and Ukraine for mining the approaches to its Black Sea ports.

A U.N. official said a separate pact signed on Friday would smooth such Russian exports and that the United Nations welcomed U.S. and European Union clarifications that their sanctions would not apply to their shipment.

G7 nations would be watching closely to ensure a deal to resume Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea does not “put Ukraine further at risk of being further invaded and attacked by Russia,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said separately Friday.

“The G7 is working closely with partners like Turkey and others to ensure that we can get that grain out of Ukraine and to places around the world where it’s needed without putting at risk Ukraine’s sovereignty and protection,” he said.

Addressing Western concerns that reopening shipping lanes could leave Ukraine open to attack, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said Moscow would not seek to take advantage of the de-mining of Ukraine’s ports.

“Russia has taken on the obligations that are clearly spelled out in this document. We will not take advantage of the fact that the ports will be cleared and opened,” Shoigu said on the Rossiya-24 state TV channel.

Ukraine’s infrastructure minister Oleksandr Kubrakov also said that Kyiv does not see a risk of Russian ships attacking through the ports as they would be vulnerable to Ukrainian missile strikes.

Safe passage

Senior U.N. officials, briefing reporters on Friday, said the deal was expected to be fully operational in a few weeks and would restore grain shipments from the three reopened ports to pre-war levels of five million tonnes a month.

Safe passage into and out of the ports would be guaranteed in what one official called a “de facto ceasefire” for the ships and facilities covered, they said, although the word “ceasefire” was not in the agreement text.

Though Ukraine has mined nearby offshore areas as part of its defences against Russia’s five-month-old invasion, Ukrainian pilots would guide ships along safe channels in its territorial waters, they said.

Monitored by a joint co-ordination centre based in Istanbul, the ships would then transit the Black Sea to Turkey’s Bosphorus strait and proceed to world markets.

The overall objective is to help avert famine among tens of millions of people in poorer nations by injecting more wheat, sunflower oil, fertilizer and other products into world markets including for humanitarian needs, partly at lower prices.

No ceasefire yet, Zelenskiy says

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said he hoped the accord offered an opportunity to resolve the wider conflict.

“We hope that these agreements represent a first step towards concrete prospects for peace, in terms that are acceptable to Ukraine,” Draghi said.

However, Ukrainian President Zelenskiy told the Wall Street Journal a pause that allowed Russia to keep Ukrainian territory would only encourage a wider war.

“Freezing the conflict with the Russian Federation means a pause that gives the Russian Federation a break for rest,” the newspaper reported Zelenskiy as saying.

“Society believes that all the territories must be liberated first, and then we can negotiate about what to do and how we could live in the centuries ahead,” he said.

The United States believes Russia’s military is sustaining hundreds of casualties a day, a senior U.S. defense official said. The official said Washington also believed Ukraine had destroyed more than 100 “high-value” Russian targets in Ukraine, including command posts and air-defence sites.

The U.S. Department of Defense is considering whether it can send fighter jets to Ukraine in the future, a White House spokesman told reporters.

There have been no major breakthroughs on front lines since Russian forces seized the last two Ukrainian-held cities in eastern Luhansk province in late June and early July.

Kyiv hopes that its gradually increasing supply of Western arms, such as U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), will allow it to recapture lost territories.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Friday its forces had destroyed four HIMARS systems between July 5-20. Kyiv denied the claims, calling them “fakes” meant to sap Western support for Ukraine. Reuters could not verify the assertions.

Russia says it is waging a “special military operation” to demilitarize its neighbour and rid it of dangerous nationalists.

Kyiv and the West say Russia is mounting an imperialist campaign to reconquer a pro-Western neighbour that broke free of Moscow’s rule when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

— Reporting by Reuters bureaux; writing by Mark Heinrich and Toby Chopra.

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