ODESA, Ukraine — On a gray, cloudy Monday morning, a patrol boat of the Ukrainian navy cuts through the choppy waters off Odesa, leaving a trail of bubbling foam in its wake.
At the stern, a sailor clad in body armor scans the horizon through binoculars. He isn’t searching for enemy warships, however.
He’s zeroing in on drones.
At the start of the invasion in February 2022, Russia’s Black Sea fleet appeared to hold a near stranglehold over Ukraine’s coast. That changed two months later, when Ukrainian anti-ship missiles sank the Moskva, the fleet’s flagship, near Snake Island.
Since then, Kyiv has expanded its arsenal of coastal missiles and of increasingly sophisticated naval drones, leading to a slow but steady retreat of Russian naval power.
Repeated Ukrainian attacks on ships, dry docks, air-defense systems and logistics hubs in occupied Crimea have forced much of the Black Sea fleet to pull back from Sevastopol toward Novorossiysk, on Russia’s eastern Black Sea coast.
Even there, Moscow’s vessels are no longer entirely safe.
By pushing Russian warships farther from Odesa and the western Black Sea, Ukraine has managed to loosen the naval blockade that once threatened to choke off the country’s exports.
While Kyiv did not win command of the sea in the traditional sense, it denied Russia the freedom to close the sea lanes. A remarkable achievement for a country without a fleet.
Yet while Russian ships have been pushed back, the drones have not.
This new threat is smaller, harder to detect and increasingly aimed at the beating heart of Ukraine’s wartime economy.
Russian drones are now daily targeting merchant vessels, port workers and the infrastructure that keeps the country’s exports moving.
“Our main goal is to ensure the safety of merchant ships so they can keep working, and so Ukraine can continue earning money through exports,” said Mykola, the boat’s pilot and a former merchant sailor. “And of course, we protect our citizens from the sea, where we can intercept drones before they reach the coast.”
The patrol boat carries several machine guns, including a Browning mounted on a turret at the bow and operated from inside the cabin.
This substantive firepower is regularly put to the test. On his phone, one sailor showed a video of a Russian naval drone drifting disabled on the surface of the water.
“We intercepted it,” he said with pride.
The work carried out by Mykola and his comrades is becoming more crucial as Russia intensifies its strikes on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, seeking to disrupt a maritime corridor that Kyiv built after Moscow withdrew from the U.N.-brokered grain deal in 2023.
The Black Sea’s shipping lanes have become a lifeline for Ukraine’s wartime economy. Since Russia captured Mariupol in 2022, with the Mykolaiv port’s operation largely coming to a halt, the Greater Odesa port complex — Odesa, Chornomorsk and Pivdennyi — has become Ukraine’s main outlet to the Black Sea.
The three ports handle nearly all of the country’s iron ore exports and more than 90% of its agricultural exports.
That makes them an obvious target.
Ukrainian officials say hundreds of port facilities and civilian vessels have been damaged or destroyed since the start of Russia’s invasion.
The pace of attacks has accelerated in recent months.
The objective, Ukrainian officials and port workers say, is clear: If Moscow cannot fully blockade Ukraine’s coastline with warships, it can try to make shipping so dangerous and expensive that the corridor becomes economically unviable.
This strategy is already showing results.
Ukrainian officials and grain traders have warned that Russian drone and missile attacks on ports, vessels, railways and power infrastructure could cut monthly grain exports from Odesa-region ports by as much as a third.
The attacks also threaten global food markets, as Ukraine remains one of the world’s major grain exporters. Any long-term disruption to its Black Sea route could hit importers in Africa, the Middle East and Asia while pushing down prices paid to Ukrainian farmers already struggling under wartime conditions.
Russia denies targeting civilians, but the pattern of strikes tells a different story to those who work along the coast.
In June, Russian drones struck two dry cargo vessels sailing under the flags of Barbados and Panama through Ukraine’s maritime corridor. Days later, Ukrainian officials said drones hit two more vessels in the Black Sea, killing one crew member aboard a Panama-flagged ship and injuring others.
Even more civilian ships under foreign flags have repeatedly found themselves caught in the campaign. In late 2025, Turkish-owned vessels were damaged in attacks on Chornomorsk and Odesa. Two Panamanian ships approaching Ukrainian ports to load grain were later targeted as well.
For Ukraine, the question now is whether civilian crews can be persuaded to enter its ports and whether insurers will cover the growing risk.
Odesa’s port workers are among the first to feel this increasing pressure.
“People are literally working on the front line,” said Oleg Hryhoriuk, chairman of the Marine Transport Workers’ Trade Union of Ukraine, which represents seafarers, dockers and port employees.
At the HHLA container terminal in Odesa, air raid alarms regularly bring operations to a standstill. On May 27, Oleksandr Shoutourminskyi, a docker and union representative at the terminal, said the staff had already lost three hours of work that day because of alerts.
Some teams, he said, spend up to eight hours of a shift in shelters.
Crane operators are among the most vulnerable, as their cabins stand high above the port, exposed to the sky and difficult to evacuate in time.
“A missile fired from Crimea can reach the port in 30 seconds to a minute and a half,” Mr. Shoutourminskyi said. “To get down from a crane takes between 2 1/2 and three minutes.”
Crane operators now work in helmets and bulletproof vests, even as summer temperatures regularly climb above 100 degrees inside the cabins. Since the strikes on port infrastructure began, the terminal has lost three employees and had eight more wounded.
“If you think people are not afraid to come to work, that would be a lie,” Mr. Shoutourminskyi said. “Every day, my guys come to work as if it were their last.”
The danger does not end when the drones are gone. On the patrol boat’s GPS screen, skull icons mark suspected drifting naval mines. Mykola said his crew helps spot them so demining teams can later neutralize the threat.
“We are tasked with identifying them,” he said.
Russia’s campaign has had indirect effects on port operations.
Strikes on the energy grid have led to regular power outages. Some equipment now runs on generators that are expensive and difficult to source. Other systems sit idle for months while spare parts are ordered from abroad.
“You order components from overseas, you wait several months for them to arrive, and then you hope they are not destroyed again,” Mr. Hryhoriuk said.
Despite the constant attacks, the ports keep working.
Since Ukraine opened its wartime maritime corridor in September 2023, more than 200 million tons of cargo have passed through it, according to Ukrainian officials.
This year, the ports have already handled tens of millions of tons.
The corridor is one of Ukraine’s most notable military and economic successes, letting the country keep selling grain, iron ore and other goods despite a war that once threatened to cut it off from the sea.
But the recovery remains fragile.
“After every improvement in the security situation, some shipowners come back,” Mr. Hryhoriuk said. “Then another attack happens, and everything is called into question again.”
Even if the ports survive the bombardments, the sector faces another threat: the slow disappearance of skilled labor.
Before the war, Ukrainian ports already struggled to attract younger workers. Since 2022, many experienced specialists have left for jobs in Germany, Poland and elsewhere in Europe. Others have been mobilized into the army.
Those who remain work under conditions few civilian port employees anywhere in the world would recognize — and endure.
“The biggest challenge after the war will probably be bringing the workers back,” Mr. Hryhoriuk said.
For now, the work continues in Odesa, Chornomorsk and Pivdennyi.
The sirens may sound. The power may go out. A drone may appear over the sea, or a missile may come from Crimea with barely enough warning to reach a shelter.
Still, the cranes move, the cargo is loaded and the ships keep sailing.
As long as Ukraine’s ports remain open, the country keeps its lifeline to the world — and a source of revenue that Moscow has failed to sever.
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