Over two days, nine vessels with 390,000 tonnes of agricultural products for Africa, Asia and Europe have left the ports of Greater Odesa, the Ministry of Infrastructure of Ukraine has said on Facebook.
Among them are the bulk carriers ALANDA STAR and SSI PRIVILEGE with 68,000 tonnes of wheat for Egypt and Indonesia, and the tanker EUROCHAMPION with 45,000 tonnes of oil for India, which departed from Odesa.
The ports of Greater Odesa are loading more than 860,000 tonnes of agricultural products on 24 vessels. Then they are waiting to be inspected by the Joint Coordination Centre (JCC).
Today, 99 vessels are awaiting inspection in the Bosporus, 72 of which are heading west to ports for loading, 27 are already with Ukrainian agricultural products. Some vessels have been waiting in Turkish waters for more than a month.
"This is the result of purposeful actions of the Russian delegation to the JCC, seeking to slow down ship inspections. First, they reduced the number of inspection groups to three, now they began to drag the inspections. Representatives of the Russian Federation began to check even indicators that are not provided for in the documents of the JCC and have nothing to do with the subject of the inspection (for example, whether the ship's units are working well, how much fuel and so on). With this algorithm, the inspection of one vessel takes at least four hours. This is unproductive and contributes to the increase of the queue. The increase in the queue means a decrease in the volume of exports of agricultural products from our ports and millions of losses for cargo owners due to downtime," Yuriy Vaskov, Deputy Minister of Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development, explained.
He added that as of 25 December, inspection group No 3 did not conduct a single inspection. As a result, only six out of 10 planned inspections took place during the day. At least 12 inspections per day are required for the grain corridor to operate in a stable manner.
Currently, three vessels are moving along the grain corridor to load 93,000 tonnes of agricultural products.
Since 1 August , 594 vessels have left the ports of Greater Odesa, exporting 15.5 million tonnes of Ukrainian food to Asia, Europe and Africa.
Earlier, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of slowing down the work of the grain corridor.