EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas called for a moratorium on attacks in the Black Sea to restore safe navigation and allow Ukraine's grain exports to reach global markets. She made the call at a UN General Assembly side event co-chaired with the foreign ministers of France, Romania, and Ukraine on 22 September in New York.

Since June, Russia has systematically struck Ukrainian ports, grain terminals, and commercial cargo ships in the Black Sea, killing crew members and crippling the export corridor that carries the bulk of Ukraine's agricultural output. The campaign—part of Russia's broader war, now in its fifth year—has disrupted global food supply chains and pushed the Black Sea toward a crisis the EU warned could surpass the 2022 grain-price shock.

Kallas said Black Sea exports have effectively ground to a halt since August because Russian attacks made commercial shipping unviable. The Gulf conflict and climate change are adding further pressure, she said. Ukraine supplies 15% of global corn exports, 10% of wheat, 15–20% of barley, and about 50% of sunflower oil, with around 90% moving through the Black Sea corridor, Kallas said. Egypt, the world's largest wheat importer, has shifted some purchases away from Russia and Ukraine as costs have risen.

"Food must never be used as a weapon in the Black Sea or anywhere else," Kallas said. "Wars make affordable food disappear from dinner tables of millions of people around the globe."

Kallas called the proposal a new "Black Sea grain arrangement," separate from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a 2022 deal brokered by Türkiye and the United Nations that Russia left in July 2023. She said the 2022 grain-price surge showed the strategic importance of the Black Sea for global security, international trade, energy, and food security.

She called on the international community to ensure safe passage of civilian vessels, protect critical infrastructure, and restore the trade route. If Russia simply stopped its attacks in the Black Sea, farmers, traders, and international food markets would have the predictability they need at this critical moment, she said. In 2025 alone, the EU mobilized €2.1 billion to strengthen global food security, Kallas added, and the EU Solidarity Lanes have facilitated about €304 billion in trade since May 2022.

At a press stakeout on 23 September, Kallas said the EU was "particularly concerned by the attacks in the Black Sea" and that "Russia is trying to choke off Ukrainian grain exports, thus jeopardizing global food security."

Russia has not publicly responded to Kallas's call. In August, Moscow dismissed a similar proposal relayed by Türkiye, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stating it saw no grounds for measures that would give Kyiv a "temporary reprieve."

A summer of strikes

Russia intensified strikes on Ukrainian ports and commercial shipping in June and July. Those strikes cut Ukrainian deepwater terminal capacity from roughly 7 million to 4–5 million metric tons per month, according to Barva Invest analyst Bohdan Kostetskyi. Ukrainian forces, in turn, struck Russia's grain terminals at Novorossiysk and Taman. Those strikes and the suspension of navigation in the Sea of Azov since July took more than 90% of Russia's Azov–Black Sea grain export capacity offline by mid-August.

The cost of sailing

The Lloyd's of London Joint War Committee has extended its high-risk designation to the entire Black Sea, pushing war-risk insurance premiums to hundreds of thousands of dollars per voyage. Alternative routes through the Danube have partly compensated, but shipping from Ukraine to Egypt has taken 26–33 days, more than twice as long as before.

For Ukraine, restoring safer navigation would reopen its largest agricultural export route, reduce reliance on slower and more expensive alternatives, and help exporters move the harvest and earn foreign currency.

The attacks have not stopped. Overnight on 23 September, Russia struck a cargo ship under an Antigua and Barbuda flag in the Black Sea, killing its captain, a Ukrainian citizen, Ukraine's sea ports administration said. The Navy evacuated the crew and put out the fire.

TAF Industries signed a joint-venture memorandum with Danish firm Upteko for production but says bureaucracy is slowing the process. Meanwhile, Resist.UA agreed to invest in BlueShadow, a Danish maritime-defense startup whose founder commanded a US nuclear submarine and whose engineering team works largely in Ukraine, Defender Media reported.

Ukraine's defense industry has outgrown much of its own 2022-era hardware in two years of rapid wartime iteration, but a government fee of 20-30% on export permits and over 200 stalled co-production bids have left the country's foreign arms sales far behind battlefield demand. Deals like the two in Denmark route Ukrainian technology into allied markets without waiting for Kyiv's export apparatus to catch up.

Ukrainian first-person-view drones, made on Danish soil

Drone maker TAF Industries plans to produce its first batch in Denmark by the end of 2026, through a joint venture with local firm Upteko. The two signed a memorandum in August 2026, but paperwork on both sides has slowed things down.

"We need to pass a fairly large number of bureaucratic procedures to make it possible," chief business development officer Mykhailo Diachenko told NordicDefenceWatch.

He called the year-end target reachable, "though maybe it will look more like a miracle."

TAF wants footholds in other countries that support Ukraine. It has started the process in Norway and is negotiating with Sweden's Recas. Diachenko said the goal is local production plus sharing Ukrainian combat experience and technology with European partners. TAF builds FPV drones, with capacity near 1 million units a year.

A Ukrainian fund bets on Odesa's sea defense

Ukrainian fund Resist.UA signed a letter of intent to invest an undisclosed sum in Danish maritime-defense startup BlueShadow's €2 million ($2.29 million) pre-seed round, the company announced. BlueShadow's software collects data from maritime sensors, commercial feeds, and open sources, merges them into a single operational picture, and uses AI to detect threats, Defender Media reported.

The company has also built an open software platform it says can help intercept Shahed-type drones. BlueSentry, designed to protect ports, offshore wind farms, undersea cables, and maritime borders from hybrid attack, is one product that the company plans to launch in the Baltic and North seas in October. BlueDragon, now in prototype testing with Defense Ministry certification targeted for late 2026 and deployment planned for spring 2027, is designed to defend Odesa with autonomous swarms of armed sea drones meant to shoot down Russian attack drones.

Founder Charles Maher is a former US Navy submarine commander who ran a nuclear-powered boat, Defender Media reported. Almost his entire engineering team works in Ukraine, drawing on more than 15 Ukrainian suppliers. Resist.UA this summer launched Resist 2.0, an Estonia-based fund aiming to raise €50 million for Ukrainian defense-tech companies.

Ukraine's arms industry wants the government to scrap a steep fee on weapons exports, warning it undercuts their prices just as Europe's defense market opens, RBC-Ukraine reported. The same fee has opened a second fight in Kyiv, where parliament this week declined to turn its revenue into money for the army.

Russia's war on Ukraine has pushed Europe into rearming, and Ukraine's battle-tested arms makers are among the few that can deliver at scale right now—an opening that domestic red tape could blunt, handing the advantage to competitors just as the market grows.

A €60 billion European window—and a fee in the way

The push comes as Europe opens a major market for Ukrainian weapons. The EU's €90 billion Ukraine Support Loan for 2026-2027 reserves €60 billion for defense purchases, and partners increasingly want weapons built on their own soil. International partners report more than 200 cooperation approaches to Ukrainian firms still without a decision, according to the industry's press release. Producers link the fee fix to Build with Ukraine, a co-production push they consider strategically significant.

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Parliament won't route the money to the army

On 15 September, the Verkhovna Rada—Ukraine's parliament—rejected a bill in first reading that would have sent fee revenue collected from 1 August 2026 into a special budget fund for the Defense Ministry, half for buying, modernizing, and repairing weapons, half for soldiers' pay. The vote left the fee itself untouched, since it rests on the Cabinet resolution, and settled only that its revenue will not be earmarked for the army.

The fee producers want gone

The Ukrainian Council of Arms Manufacturers, joined by other defense and employer groups, prepared proposals to rework the July government resolution, No. 875. They want the fee—20% on finished goods and technologies, 30% on parts—cut to zero, or capped at 5%. Firms must also pay upfront, before any foreign payment lands, with no refund guaranteed if a deal collapses. A UAH 15 million (about $337,000) threshold shuts out the small test shipments new clients often begin with.

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The fee has drawn complaints since the resolution took effect in early July. Ihor Fedirko, the council's executive director, earlier said the 30-day review window was welcome but warned it could clog into a bureaucratic queue as staff leave the agencies running it. One of the associations behind the submission calls the 30% rate on parts prohibitive, since Europe is where Ukrainian firms would undercut Chinese suppliers on price.

Ukraine has swung from banning weapons sales abroad to courting foreign buyers, and its defense sector now ranks among the country's fastest-growing industries. Wartime certification to NATO standards is turning that output into something European militaries can actually buy.

The US House of Representatives has approved sweeping new sanctions on Russia and the countries and companies that help finance its war, sending the measure to the president to sign into law, The Hill reported. The vote breaks a nearly two-year stretch in which Congress passed no major measure to back Ukraine. It also hands Washington fresh power to choke the oil money that keeps Moscow's war running.

For most of the full-scale war, US backing for Kyiv came through emergency spending battles, not laws built to cut off Moscow's income. Washington's long wager that negotiations would end the fighting kept its sharpest economic tools on the shelf. That bet has now shifted toward squeezing the customers who keep the Kremlin's oil trade alive.

The vote and what comes next

In the House, 58 Democrats broke from their party's leaders on 16 September to join most Republicans. The bill passed 262-159, with 203 Republicans and one independent also voting yes, and seven Republicans joining 152 Democrats against.

Whether the full weight of the bill lands is now Trump's call. A White House official said he planned to sign it, and the White House had pushed House Republican leaders to move it. The bill directs him to impose the tariffs and mandates sanctions on Putin, senior officials, and Russian banks, though he can waive them by certifying that it serves US national interests, and how far he goes stays uncertain.

His posture on Russia keeps shifting. Days before the vote, he urged Kyiv to stop striking Russian oil refineries. He said the strikes were pushing diesel prices up worldwide. Those same strikes drain the war economy this bill sets out to squeeze.

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What the sanctions do

The bill directs Washington to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the five biggest buyers of Russian crude, the five biggest buyers of its gas, and the five countries doing most to help Moscow evade oil sanctions—a target aimed squarely at China and India. Countries whose Russian gas imports are less than 15% of everything Russia exports in gas, and that take significant steps to cut them, would be exempt from the gas-based tariff. There is no such carve-out for crude.

It also blacklists Russian officials, banks, and the aging tankers of Russia's shadow fleet, the vessels that move sanctioned crude around Western restrictions. The measure also extends US sanctions on Iran's energy and weapons sectors, a piece Trump asked for. That is why the bill's full name is the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act.

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Why a stalled bill finally moved

For more than a year, the package sat frozen. It had a veto-proof majority of co-sponsors, but the White House wanted room to negotiate with Moscow, and the bill never reached a vote. Its author, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, spent more than a year negotiating the measure before he died in July. Lawmakers in both parties revived and fast-tracked it in his name, and Trump dropped his resistance and signaled he would sign.

Not everyone wanted it. Most House Democrats voted against, saying the bill hands the president broad new tariff powers and lets him waive away the sanctions it claims to impose. Nearly a dozen Republicans privately pressed leaders to strip the new powers out, alarmed they could push up prices at home before the midterm elections. Their leaders moved it through anyway. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had lobbied for weeks, even watching an early Senate vote from the chamber.

"To Vladimir Putin—we have your number," said Senator Richard Blumenthal, who co-wrote the bill, after the vote. "And to Ukraine—you are not alone."

Kyiv's response

Ukraine welcomed the vote within hours. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha thanked the House for its bipartisan leadership and said Ukraine honors Graham's legacy. Parliament speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk thanked both chambers of Congress and House Speaker Mike Johnson. He singled out Blumenthal for carrying the bill through after Graham's death. What matters for Ukraine, Stefanchuk said, is that pressure on Russia's war funding is turning into concrete decisions.

President Zelenskyy called the timing symbolic: the House voted during another Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine. The bill and other strong sanctions steps are "an extremely powerful instrument capable of stopping this terrorist war," he said.

Ukraine's largest arms-industry group says it is backing the country's drive to sell and co-produce weapons abroad, while pressing the government to fix two separate obstacles in its way. The Council of Defense Industry, which represents more than 400 companies, wants a costly new export-permit fee and a stalled joint-production program to be upgraded, it said on Facebook.

The two problems are distinct. Resolution 875, the wartime rules for shipping arms abroad, charges a 20-30 percent fee on export permits, which the industry says prices Ukrainian goods out of the market.

The export fee bites

Resolution 875, adopted in July, was intended to streamline exports, with a 30-day review period and a streamlined path for partner countries. But the fee has choked it: only about 10 small export contracts have been signed since exports began, and not one permit has been issued under the new rules, Militarnyi reports.

"Resolution 875 in its current form contains provisions that could substantially worsen the competitiveness of Ukrainian producers," the group says.

Build with Ukraine is a separate track

The program lets producers export their technology and set up joint production abroad, reaching EU markets, financing, and infrastructure, while partners fund weapons production inside Ukraine.

The program lets producers export their technology and set up joint production abroad, reaching EU markets, financing, and infrastructure, while partners fund weapons production inside Ukraine. Talks are underway with Denmark, Norway, and Germany.

President Zelenskyy has said $43 billion was raised for Ukraine's defense industry in 2025, floated a goal of partner states each spending 0.25 percent of their GDP on it, and stressed that no Ukrainian technology will reach countries tied to Russia.

The Council, whose ecosystem spans more than 360 manufacturers, 28 drone-pilot schools, and 20 defense venture funds, says it is ready to help refine the mechanism.

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Major shutdowns at Russia's key airports on July 5–6 caused by Ukrainian drone attacks could cost Russian airlines around 20 billion rubles ($254 million), the pro-Kremlin outlet Kommersant reported on July 7, citing airline representatives and industry experts.

Since the start of mass disruptions on July 5, a total of 485 flights were canceled, 88 were diverted to alternate airports, and another 1,900 were delayed across major hubs, according to Russia's aviation agency Rosaviatsiya.

The drone attacks prompted operational shutdowns that triggered widespread logistical and economic consequences. Over 94,000 passengers were housed in hotels, 43,000 refunds were processed, and hundreds of thousands of vouchers for food and drinks were issued.

The estimated financial toll includes direct airline losses from canceled Boeing 737-800 flights, which can run between 15 million and 23 million rubles ($190,000–$292,000) each depending on the route, as well as costs for delays, diversions, and passenger care.

Experts say the true cost could be far higher. Dmitry Datsykov of EXPO.UAV estimated tens of billions of rubles in additional indirect losses, including missed connections, taxi and hotel losses, and supply chain disruptions.

Ukraine has not publicly claimed responsibility for the disruptions but has acknowledged that its drone strategy aims to undermine Russian logistics and force the war's consequences closer to the Russian public.

The economic fallout comes amid growing scrutiny of Russia's transport sector. On July 7, President Vladimir Putin dismissed Transport Minister Roman Starovoit following the aviation chaos and a high-profile ammonia leak at the Ust-Luga port.

The Kremlin has increasingly struggled to protect critical infrastructure from Kyiv's deep-strike drone campaign, which in recent months has expanded to include refineries, radar plants, and now Russia's busiest airports.

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Russia's largest airports experienced hours-long flight delays and cancellations on July 5, as authorities imposed temporary restrictions due to a reported threat of Ukrainian drone attacks, the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Shot reported.

Ukraine hasn't commented on the report. Kyiv's drone campaign, which has increasingly disrupted civilian air travel in Russia, is part of Ukraine's broader strategy to undermine Russia's logistics far beyond the front line.

Some passengers in Russia reported waiting more than 10 hours on July 5 as their flights were being delayed, according to Shot.

Departures at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport were halted for several hours, delaying over 20 flights. At St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Airport, roughly 50 flights were delayed and more than 20 canceled.

Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko said that two drones were shot down south of St. Petersburg, prompting a temporary suspension of operations at Pulkovo Airport.

The disruptions followed a wave of Ukrainian drone attacks overnight, which targeted military and industrial infrastructure in at least six Russian regions.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it intercepted 42 drones within three hours, mainly over the Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk oblasts near the Ukrainian border.

Novaya Gazeta Europe reported in May that at least 217 temporary airport closures have occurred across Russia since Jan. 1 due to drone threats, more than in 2023 and 2024 combined.

A similar wave of strikes ahead of Russia's Victory Day in May led to massive delays, affecting an estimated 60,000 travelers.

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