How Russia’s Systematic Destruction of Odesa’s Port Infrastructure Reaches Singapore’s Tables
Feature | Geopolitics & Food Security | 27 February 2026
Four years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Black Sea port city of Odesa endures more than 800 air raid alerts a year. The bombs are reshaping global commodity markets — and the consequences, transmitted through shipping lanes and supply chains, are already being felt 8,400 kilometres away in Singapore.
I. The Doctrine of Maritime Denial
On a clear winter morning at Odesa’s container terminal, crane operator Viktor Berestenko scrolled through photographs on his phone — burned-out trucks, warehouses gutted by fire, steel superstructures buckled from the heat of missile impacts. ‘It’s war, every night,’ he told reporters from AFP, gazing out at the blue and yellow cranes still towering over the Black Sea horizon. They had not yet been hit. He did not sound confident they would remain standing.
Russia’s escalating bombardment of Odesa is not random or opportunistic. It follows a coherent strategic logic — maritime denial — that seeks to sever Ukraine from its last viable sea access, devastate its export economy, and in doing so, extend the coercive reach of the war into the grain markets that feed much of the developing world. The attacks have tripled in frequency over the past year. More than 800 air raid alerts sounded over Odesa in 2025 alone, amounting to what port authorities calculate as over a month of lost operational time.
To understand why this matters beyond Ukraine, it is necessary to understand what Odesa represents in the architecture of global food supply. Ukraine — despite four years of war, despite having lost substantial agricultural territory to Russian occupation in the east and south — remains the world’s leading exporter of sunflower oil, accounting for roughly half of global trade in that commodity. It is also among the top exporters of wheat and corn. Almost all of this cargo moves by sea. Almost all of it moves through Odesa.
“Without ports, Ukraine will be destroyed.” — Viktor Berestenko, logistics director, Inter Trans, Odesa
The strategic calculus behind the bombardment campaign is straightforward. Russia already controls the port cities of Mariupol and Berdiansk to the east, having seized them in the early stages of the full-scale invasion. With Ukraine’s eastern coastline effectively under Russian dominion, Odesa represents the last significant maritime outlet. When Moscow walked away from the UN and Turkey-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative in July 2023, it removed the principal diplomatic constraint on targeting that outlet. What followed — an intensifying campaign against port infrastructure, storage facilities, oil terminals, and the vessels loading within them — was the logical next step in a strategy of economic attrition.
The numbers document the toll with bleak precision. In 2025, some 57 ships and 336 pieces of port equipment were damaged in strikes. A December ballistic missile attack killed eight people. In the same month, Russia struck the Allseeds Black Sea facility at Pivdennyi port — Ukraine’s largest vegetable oil terminal — destroying thousands of tonnes of sunflower oil and killing one employee. Export volumes through the maritime corridor fell 15 percent last year. Cargo throughput, which had reached 76 million tonnes across six Odesa-region ports in the first eleven months of 2025, is moving against a backdrop of near-nightly alerts that compress operating windows and stretch the nerves of workers who must make the calculation, each time a siren sounds, of whether forty-five seconds is enough time to climb down a crane.
It often is not. Ballistic missiles fired from Russian-occupied Crimea can reach Odesa in under two minutes. The geometry of the threat — the proximity of the launchpad, the speed of delivery, the inadequacy of warning time — is not incidental. It is structural, and it transforms every shift in the port into a sustained exercise in risk tolerance that no normal logistics operation is designed to absorb indefinitely.
II. The Grain Initiative and Its Collapse
To appreciate the significance of what is now under attack, one must understand what was briefly protected. The Black Sea Grain Initiative, brokered by the United Nations and Turkey in July 2022 after the full-scale invasion had already shuttered Ukrainian ports and sent global wheat prices to fourteen-year highs, provided a narrow but consequential relief valve. It created a monitored maritime corridor through which Ukrainian agricultural exports — grain, corn, sunflower oil — could reach global markets under an arrangement that, for a time, appeared to serve both humanitarian and diplomatic interests. Wheat futures, which had surged roughly 16 percent above counterfactual levels within nine weeks of the February 2022 invasion, began to ease once the EU Solidarity Lanes opened and the grain initiative took effect.
Russia withdrew from the arrangement in July 2023, citing what it characterised as unfulfilled commitments regarding its own agricultural and fertiliser exports — a claim the United States and Ukraine disputed. The initiative had already proven fragile: Russia had struck Odesa port the day after the agreement was signed in 2022, signalling from the outset that the deal’s stability was contingent on Russian forbearance that could be withdrawn at any time. When that forbearance ended, Ukraine improvised. Kyiv established an alternative corridor — a western coastal route hugging the shorelines of Romania and Bulgaria before passing through the Bosphorus into the Mediterranean — and succeeded in keeping exports moving. More than 170 million tonnes of cargo have passed through this route since its establishment, reaching 55 countries, the majority of them in Africa.
But the alternative corridor operates without the diplomatic scaffolding that the grain initiative provided. It is sustained by Ukrainian naval drones that have succeeded in pushing Russia’s Black Sea Fleet back from Ukrainian waters, and by the determination of commercial shippers willing to absorb elevated war-risk insurance premiums. It is also sustained, more precariously, by the absence of a successful Russian effort to shut it down entirely — an absence that appears increasingly contingent as Moscow’s willingness to strike foreign-flagged vessels escalates. A Turkish-owned cargo ship was hit in December 2025. A Panama-flagged bulk carrier loading wheat for Algeria was struck by a ballistic missile in March 2025, killing four Syrian crew members. The attacks are no longer confined to port infrastructure. They are extending to the vessels themselves.
“Attacks on tankers in and near the Black Sea have increased shipping risk and disrupted loadings, cutting the pool of immediately available export cargoes and forcing buyers to pay up for prompt shipments.” — Market analysis, December 2025
III. Commodity Markets: The Price of War
The consequences of this sustained assault are measurable in global commodity markets. Sunflower oil prices climbed to approximately USD 1,430 per tonne in late 2025 — a multi-year high, up roughly 12 percent year-to-date — as Black Sea supply disruptions collided with strong industrial and biodiesel demand from South Asia and Europe. By late January 2026, futures had pushed above USD 1,539 per tonne, the highest level in over three years. Global supply of sunflower oil stood at 25.1 million tonnes in 2025-26, down sharply from 28.2 million tonnes two years earlier. Ukraine and Russia together remain the dominant suppliers, controlling a combined export share that no other producing region has yet been able to replicate.
The arithmetic of substitution is unfavourable. Argentina, the principal alternative supplier of sunflower oil, increased its exports by approximately 30 percent in 2025 — a significant response to Black Sea tightness — but remained insufficient to fill the gap. Palm oil and soybean oil, the natural substitutes in edible oil markets, have themselves seen elevated prices in recent years, narrowing the arbitrage opportunity and keeping replacement-value thresholds high. For importers dependent on Black Sea sourcing, the consequence is not merely higher landed costs but what market analysts describe as elevated freight risk premiums — the additional insurance and logistical costs that accumulate when loading a cargo in a port that may be struck by a ballistic missile within the hour.
Wheat markets have been similarly affected, though with more complexity given Russia’s continued role as the world’s largest wheat exporter. Black Sea wheat prices have fluctuated significantly with the rhythm of the war, with futures reacting sharply to any perceived threat to export continuity. Ukraine’s wheat production for 2025 is estimated at approximately 21 million metric tonnes — down from 32 million in pre-war 2021, reflecting both the loss of occupied agricultural territory and the progressive destruction of farming inputs, logistics infrastructure, and rural livelihoods that four years of conflict produces. The cumulative erosion is less visible than a single dramatic attack but no less consequential for long-run global supply.
Fertiliser markets compound the picture. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of nitrogen fertilisers and a major supplier of potash and mixed fertilisers. Sanctions have disrupted trade flows and elevated production costs for farmers worldwide — in Southeast Asia, in South Asia, in Africa. Higher fertiliser prices translate into higher food production costs, which translate into higher consumer prices for commodities that have no direct connection to Ukraine. The war in the Black Sea is thus not merely a disruption to Ukrainian exports; it is a cost multiplier across the entire global agricultural production system.
IV. Singapore in the Supply Chain
Singapore imports more than 90 percent of its food from more than 180 countries and regions. This extraordinary import dependency is a function of the city-state’s geography — 729 square kilometres, with barely one percent of land suited to agriculture — but it is also, by long design, a managed vulnerability. Singapore has spent decades building what its government calls a ‘three baskets’ food security strategy: import diversification, local production, and stockpiling. The approach has produced genuine resilience. When the Ukraine war disrupted global commodity markets in 2022, Singapore’s broad supplier base allowed importers to adjust faster than more concentrated sourcing would have permitted.
Yet diversification has its limits, and the sustained degradation of Odesa’s export capacity tests those limits in specific and instructive ways. Singapore’s egg supply — a politically sensitive staple in a society acutely attentive to food prices — is supported by imports from Ukraine, Poland, and Spain, among other sources. When the 2022 invasion disrupted Russian and Ukrainian grain exports and drove up the cost of chicken feed globally, egg prices in Singapore and Malaysia rose in direct consequence. The mechanism was indirect but traceable: higher feed costs flowing from Black Sea supply disruption to regional egg producers, to Singaporean consumers. It was a demonstration of how a conflict on the other side of the Eurasian landmass can materialise on the shelves of a hawker centre in Toa Payoh.
Environment Minister Grace Fu, speaking at the Asia-Pacific Agri-Food Innovation Summit in November 2025 — the occasion on which Singapore announced its new Singapore Food Story 2 strategy — was unusually explicit about this connection. ‘The Russia-Ukraine conflict showed this clearly,’ she told delegates. ‘It is happening miles away from Singapore. Yet, by disrupting the global supply of fertilisers and animal feed, the conflict indirectly triggered export restrictions on food items in Singapore.’ The remark is notable for its candour: Singapore’s government is not merely monitoring the war as a geopolitical abstraction. It is treating it as a structural input into domestic food security planning.
“The Russia-Ukraine conflict showed this clearly. It is happening miles away from Singapore. Yet by disrupting the global supply of fertilisers and animal feed, the conflict indirectly triggered export restrictions on food items in Singapore.” — Minister Grace Fu, November 2025
Beyond food, there is the question of Singapore’s role as a commodities trading hub. The city-state is home to more than 400 commodities companies and functions as a critical trading ecosystem for agricultural commodities flowing between major producing regions — the Middle East, Australia, South America — and the major consuming markets of China, India, and Southeast Asia. Port of Singapore is among the world’s busiest. Traders based in Singapore price, hedge, and route Black Sea commodities — Ukrainian sunflower oil, Russian wheat, corn from Odesa — through Singapore-based desks and financial structures. When Black Sea freight premiums rise, when supply uncertainty elevates basis risk in futures markets, when war-risk insurance premiums push up the CIF cost of Ukrainian cargoes, these effects land directly on Singapore trading floors. The Platts assessments for sunflower oil — benchmarks against which Singapore-based commodity traders structure their contracts — have reflected the Black Sea premium consistently through 2025 and into 2026.
The broader regional dimension matters too. Singapore functions as a food security nerve centre for Southeast Asia, a region of 680 million people with its own significant import dependencies. Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam all draw on global grain and oilseed markets in which Black Sea supplies play a significant role. Disruptions that raise commodity prices globally do not stay comfortably offshore; they propagate through the region’s food systems, affecting food-insecure populations in ways that eventually create political and economic pressures that Singapore, as a regional hub, cannot insulate itself from entirely.
V. Singapore Food Story 2 and the New Calculus of Resilience
Singapore’s November 2025 announcement of the Singapore Food Story 2 — replacing the original ’30 by 30′ production target with a more flexible four-pronged strategy encompassing local production, import diversification, stockpiling, and international partnerships — was implicitly a response to precisely the kind of systemic shock the Odesa crisis represents. The original strategy’s single-minded focus on local production had produced real gains — local farms now supply approximately 28-30 percent of egg consumption — but it could not address Singapore’s structural dependence on globally-traded commodities for which local production is not a realistic alternative.
The new strategy’s emphasis on stockpiling is significant. Following lessons drawn from COVID-19 supply disruptions, Singapore has strategically expanded its stockpile to include frozen protein and canned vegetables. A new research domain on food resilience, established in 2025, focuses on climate-induced risk assessment and optimised food storage solutions — capabilities with obvious dual-use value in a geopolitical environment where port infrastructure in one region can be rendered inoperable overnight. The October 2025 Agreement on Trade in Essential Supplies with New Zealand — which provides legal assurance that both countries can continue trading key food items without export prohibitions during disruptions — points in the same direction: institutionalising supply relationships in ways that survive acute crises.
What Singapore cannot fully insure against is the price signal itself. Diversified sourcing buffers against physical supply shortages but does not neutralise commodity price inflation. When sunflower oil prices hit three-year highs because Odesa’s terminals have been struck, Singapore-based importers pay those prices regardless of whether the specific oil they purchase passed through Odesa. Global commodity benchmarks are just that — global. The Allseeds terminal at Pivdennyi can burn, and the price impact reaches Singapore through futures markets before the smoke clears.
The structural challenge this poses is long-run and structural rather than acute and solvable. As long as Russia continues its maritime denial strategy against Odesa — and as long as the diplomatic and military conditions for ending that campaign remain absent — Black Sea commodity markets will carry a sustained war premium. That premium is not a temporary spike; it is an embedded structural cost that will flow through global food systems for as long as the conditions generating it persist. Singapore’s extraordinary logistics sophistication and its carefully maintained import diversification provide buffers. They do not provide immunity.
VI. The Geopolitical Stakes
The strategic logic of Russia’s campaign against Odesa’s port infrastructure extends beyond Ukraine’s immediate economic incapacitation. It is also a demonstration, intended for a watching world, of the vulnerability of maritime-dependent food supply chains to deliberate disruption by a state actor willing to absorb the reputational costs of targeting civilian infrastructure and foreign-flagged vessels. The UN Security Council has heard Ukraine’s foreign minister frame individual strikes — including the March 2025 attack on a vessel loading wheat for Algeria — as attacks on global food security. The framing is not rhetorical: a strike that kills four Syrian nationals and prevents an Algerian wheat cargo from leaving port is a food security event for Algeria, not merely a military event for Ukraine.
The cascading downstream effects have been most acute for the Global South — the African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian countries that depend most heavily on Black Sea agricultural exports. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, sourced 35 percent of its wheat from Ukraine before the war. Lebanon, whose bread prices rose by 70 percent after the 2022 export blockade, imported 61 percent of its wheat from Ukraine in 2020. Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia — already among the world’s most food-insecure nations — are disproportionately exposed to price volatility generated thousands of kilometres away in the Black Sea. For these countries, the destruction of Odesa’s port infrastructure is not a geopolitical abstraction; it is a direct cost to human welfare.
For Singapore, a city-state that has built its modern prosperity on the openness of global trade and the reliability of maritime logistics, the strategic implications cut differently but no less deeply. The normalisation of deliberate attacks on port infrastructure, on commercial shipping, on the maritime architecture of global trade — if that normalisation takes hold as a precedent — creates a world in which Singapore’s fundamental strategic assumptions become harder to sustain. A global trading order in which civilian ports can be systematically destroyed and foreign-flagged vessels struck with impunity is not the global trading order in which Singapore’s model was built or in which it can operate with its current confidence.
This may be why Singapore, despite its longstanding policy of non-alignment and its careful navigation of major-power rivalries, has consistently voted with the majority of UN member states in resolutions affirming Ukrainian sovereignty and condemning attacks on civilian infrastructure. The principled position and the strategic interest, in this case, align.
VII. What Comes Next
On the morning of February 27, 2026, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba announced that the maritime corridor remained operational following yet another massive overnight attack on port facilities. The statement was accurate and deliberately measured. It is the statement that Ukrainian officials have been making, with varying degrees of strain in their voices, for over two years. The corridor continues to function. Cargo continues to move. Ships continue to load and sail. And Odesa continues to be bombed.
The question is not whether the corridor will survive any single night of strikes — it has proven more resilient than many analysts expected — but whether, over time, the cumulative attrition of infrastructure, the erosion of operational capacity, the rising insurance costs, and the accelerating casualty toll among port workers and crew members will produce a slow-motion failure that no single dramatic attack achieves. Port equipment takes time to replace. Skilled crane operators who leave do not always return. Storage capacity once destroyed cannot be instantaneously rebuilt. The mathematics of attrition are not always visible in daily operational bulletins.
For Singapore, the relevant question is not whether Odesa will fall — that is a military and political question with dimensions that extend far beyond any single city’s port infrastructure — but how the permanent elevation of Black Sea risk, the embedding of war premiums in commodity markets, and the demonstrated vulnerability of maritime infrastructure to deliberate state aggression will shape food security planning, commodity trading strategy, and supply chain architecture in the years ahead.
The Singapore Food Story 2 represents one government’s answer to that question: build more buffers, diversify more aggressively, institutionalise supply relationships, invest in local production where possible, and maintain the stockpiles that buffer against acute disruption. It is a sensible strategy for a world in which the assumptions of the previous era of globalisation — open seas, stable supply chains, the rule-bound conduct of maritime commerce — can no longer be taken for granted.
Back in Odesa, crane operator Iryna summarised her working conditions with the blunt honesty of someone who has stopped searching for a more elegant formulation. ‘When the alarm sounds, we go down,’ she said. ‘We put our trust in God.’ Sometimes the alerts last three hours. When they end, if nothing has been hit, the cranes resume loading. The grain goes out. The oil flows. For now.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
AFP / Yahoo News; Al Jazeera; Modern Diplomacy; WSJ / United24 Media; The Moscow Times; TRT World; UN Security Council Press (SC/15367); FAO Information Notes on Russia-Ukraine Conflict; S&P Global / Platts commodity assessments; Singapore Food Agency (SFA); Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment (Singapore Food Story 2, November 2025); Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy Case Study; SG101.gov.sg; HedgePoint Global; Tradologie.com; ChemAnalyst; Scientific Reports (Nature, 2023); Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems (2023); ScienceDirect — Agricultural Commodity Markets and the Black Sea Grain Initiative (2023); Capital Press; S&P Global Factbox (March 2025).