World Boxing has lifted the last restrictions on Russian athletes, clearing them to compete under their own flag and anthem as they chase qualification for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Days earlier, in a frontline Kherson gym that Russian artillery had wrecked, the teenage boxers who trained there had recorded their own message to the Olympic movement: keep Russia out.

World Boxing approved the change on 30 July, the latest sports federation to roll back its wartime restrictions as the Olympic movement eases Russia back toward the Games, even as its attacks keep destroying Ukraine's sports infrastructure and the lives of athletes in frontline oblasts such as Kherson.

The 11-year-old martial-arts champion who trains between drone strikes

Tymur, 11, steps out into his yard and listens to the sky. No buzzing. This means no “human safari” drones nearby. Timur has just given himself his morning insulin shot, had his breakfast, and he now heads for his punching bag, hanging from the old walnut tree. He warms up with pull-ups, the branch being his pull-up bar, as his dog runs around, and then works the punching bag, pierced by Russian shrapnel.

Training in the yard is not enough, so Tymur rides his bicycle under Russian FPV drone attacks to his practice session. Along the way, he stops to hide under a tree. In summer, Kherson poplars and sycamore trees offer many good hiding places, and the anti-drone nets cover many streets, but the Russian drones are flying low now.

When they spot a car, a pedestrian, or a child on a bicycle, they dive even lower. The pilots on the other side of the river see their targets but carry on with their hunt. Lately, some drones fly without making any noise.

Hearing loud buzzing, Timur jumps off the bike and throws himself in the grass. Lawns are often littered with mines, but there is no choice. After a few stops, he arrives at the practice, held in a basement. For a while, Timur can focus on the training—until he starts on his way back home.

Tymur, the Kherson city champion in hand-to-hand combat and the Mykolaiv Oblast champion in MMA, takes his training seriously, even after he was diagnosed with insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetes right after the occupation. He dreams of becoming the champion of Ukraine, Europe, and the world.

His role model is Muhammad "D.K." Ali, a British professional boxer who, like Tymur, lives with insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetes. He is also inspired by Yulian Pozdniakov, a Ukrainian professional kickboxer, a European professional kickboxing champion, a Ukrainian IFMA Muay Thai and WAKO K-1 champion, and Timur has recently started training in kickboxing and Muay Thai.

Chess retreats to a basement after Russia jails the grandfather who taught it

Like Tymur, Sasha started boxing before the occupation. Eight at the time, he also practiced chess with his grandfather, an avid player, who was kidnapped by the Russian military during the occupation and sentenced to 20 years of strict regime on fabricated charges. Sasha stopped boxing, but he still plays chess.

His grandmother Tania, who also plays chess, said in an interview that Kherson is “a sports city.” Tania trains at home, doing yoga and general fitness routines.

“Everything here—our rivers and fields—is made for an active lifestyle,” said Tania. “And so our people are fit, morally and physically. The enemy is trying to destroy our places of strength, but our children stand firm and train. They do not give up in spirit.”

Her daughter, Sasha’s aunt, also practices with him over the phone as she had to move to Mykolaiv due to intense attacks on her district of Kherson. She used to go to the Children’s and Youth Sports School, also known as Chess Club. Sasha practices online with a coach during the week, but on the weekend he follows the family tradition and joins about 20 other young Kherson chess players for in-person training at the same school. Tania often walks her grandson to the basement practices, and fondly remembers the chess club and its beautiful home.

Since the 1980s, the Children's and Youth Sports School, funded by the city, held training and national and international tournaments at a historic building, a snow-white villa with arched windows and ornate wrought-iron balconies downtown Kherson. Vitaliy Bohdanov, the president of the Kherson Oblast Chess Federation for over 20 years, told Euromaidan Press that generations of young Khersonians studied chess and checkers in a former residence of the Italian embassy.

In 2023, the school had to move classes and tournaments to a safe underground facility due to constant shelling, and the building stood vacant. On 24 July 2026, the Russian military destroyed the architectural monument. The building burned out, taking a 5,000-book library of books on chess with it, and its roof collapsed after artillery and drone attacks, during which drones dropped incendiary napalm-like mixture.

Russia levels the last boxing gym as its teenagers film a plea to the IOC

The morning after the chess club was destroyed, Russian artillery hit Kherson's only surviving boxing gym. After the city's liberation, the gym hosted regular training sessions and competitions.

The youth team just returned from a tournament and, instead of practicing, helped to clean the premises. Four young athletes recorded an address to the International Olympic Committee, pleading to ban Russian athletes from international competitions. Tymofiy, 15, said that he trained in this boxing ring for seven years and could not find the words.

Standing amid bricks and fallen ceiling beams, Dmytro Obolentsev, Director of the Kherson Regional Children and Youth Sports School for Boxing and Other Sports and coach of the youth team, said that training will continue.

“These walls witnessed it all: the nerve-breaking moments before stepping onto the floor, the smiles after victory, the tears of defeat, the embraces of coaches, the applause of families, and the unforgettable moment when a young athlete stepped onto the podium to receive a well-earned medal and trophy,” wrote Zakhar Zhizhko, a Kherson resident. “Years will pass, but the memory of those competitions will remain. We want to believe that this gym will once again be filled with children's laughter, genuine emotion, and the joy of victory.”

The Olympic medalist who can no longer reach his river, and trains anyway

Serhiy Kyrsanov, a fit man in his sixties, cleaned the destruction site on 29 July, after several Shahid drones devastated his neighborhood in the residential area of Kherson. Serhiy and his wife Luiza mopped broken glass and considered themselves lucky: their neighbors’ homes were destroyed and burned. Their spacious house featured Olympic posters and impressive memorabilia: Serhiy, a prominent Ukrainian rower, is an Olympic silver medalist and three-time world champion.

As Luiza wiped dust off the medal display in the living room, she said that both she and her husband are still involved in youth training in the city.

“I can’t row as we can’t reach the river,” said Serhiy. “But we do all sorts of other training, and we are not going to stop.”

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The chess world condemns as the boxers' video circles the globe

The Italian Embassy in Ukraine condemned the attack on the chess school building, which was built for the Italian Ambassador in 1905 and hosted the Italian Embassy from 1906 to 1918. Lithuanian grandmaster and politician Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen expressed her indignation. Peter Heine Nielsen, a Danish chess grandmaster and five-time Danish champion, also condemned the attack. Garry Kasparov, former World Chess Champion and one of the greatest chess players in history, wrote that he was looking forward to helping to rebuild the chess club.

The boxing team’s video address to the International Olympic Committee went viral and was shared globally. Vladyslav Heraskevych, the first Ukrainian ever to compete in skeleton at the Winter Olympics, and an advocate for excluding Russian and Belarusian athletes from international sport, shared the address, adding that “Russian sports is an accomplice to Russia’s crimes.” The Boxing Federation of Ukraine issued a statement about the attack and looked into fundraising options.

"A sports city": 221 venues destroyed, its athletes still on the podium

Tymur, Sasha and the young boxers are not an exception. The girls’ soccer team used to train outdoors until a Russian shell destroyed the soccer field. Russian shelling heavily damaged Kherson's only indoor ice rink, once home to youth hockey and figure skating. The war has devastated Kherson Oblast's sporting infrastructure as 221 sports facilities have been damaged or destroyed, forcing many clubs and sports schools to relocate, operate in basements, or train in mixed and remote formats.

Yet, sports go a long way in the city nicknamed “invincible.” Mothers and grandmothers frequent various training sessions, from fly yoga to belly dance and karate. Fathers and grandfathers run under drones and used to play basketball and soccer in the red zone until the point when being outside became impossible due to the massive FPV drone attacks. Swimming pools and gyms operate in half-ruined buildings and, in winter, in freezing temperatures.

Despite daily Russian attacks, Kherson's sports community continues to compete. According to the official regional statistics, provided by the Department of Physical Culture, Youth and Sports of the Kherson Regional State Administration, in 2025 more than 50 athletes from Kherson Oblast were winners or medalists at international and Ukrainian competitions across more than 20 sports, including rowing, wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, athletics, archery, volleyball, swimming, karate, sambo, draughts, sumo and canoeing.

The list included Olympic, Paralympic and Deaflympic athletes, as well as world, European and national champions and medalists. Kherson athletes competed at the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Deaflympics, and World and European Championships, while more than a dozen regional coaches were recognized for training international-level competitors.

During the first six months of 2026, 396 athletes from Kherson Oblast took part in Ukrainian and international competitions, winning 74 medals in Olympic sports, 93 in non-Olympic disciplines, and 10 in Paralympic and Deaflympic events.

Nearly 200 displaced children from Kherson Oblast participated in regional sports competitions, while another 198 children from frontline communities attended a two-week sports and rehabilitation camp in the Carpathians.

The boxers whose gym Russia destroyed had asked the Olympic movement to keep Russia out. On 30 July, World Boxing gave its answer: Russian athletes will compete under their own flag, like everyone else. Their ring is still rubble. Training, their coach said, continues—in the basement, under the nets.

• CBS sidelines Romo indefinitely after arrest

• JJ Watt promoted to lead booth in absence

• Arrest followed Wisconsin OWI traffic stop

Tony Romo has been placed on leave from his role as the lead analyst on CBS’ NFL coverage following his arrest last week on suspicion of operating a vehicle while under the influence.

CBS Sports announced Friday that the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback was on leave “until further notice”. JJ Watt will join Jim Nantz and Tracy Wolfson as CBS Sports’ lead NFL team during Romo’s absence.

A six-time world champion and three-time World Cup MVP, Japan’s Ayami Sato joins the new Women’s Professional Baseball League hoping to help build the sport’s future

When Ayami Sato takes the mound as the starting pitcher for the Los Angeles Queens on Saturday, it will be the culmination of a professional career that has spanned 16 years and three countries. The right-handed hurler is largely considered the best pitcher in the history of women’s baseball. She has the awards and experience to prove it, and now she’s taking on America when she makes her debut in the Women’s Professional Baseball League, the first pro women’s baseball league in the United States since the 1950s.

Even though most Americans tuning into the WPBL may not have heard of her, Sato’s resume speaks for itself. Sato’s fastball has been clocked at nearly 80mph and her curveball has a devastating spin rate that is higher than many Major League Baseball pitchers. As a member of the Japan National Team since 2010, Sato has won six gold medals. She is the only player in Women’s Baseball World Cup history to win three consecutive MVP awards. As a member of the now-defunct Japan’s Women’s Baseball League, Sato led the league in strikeouts in three of the last four seasons. And most recently, in 2024 she became the first woman to play pro baseball in Canada as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs of the Intercounty Baseball League.

The World Cup gave MLS unprecedented momentum. Keeping it will depend less on signing aging icons than convincing America’s best young players to stay

“Thanks World, we’ll take it from here,” is Major League Soccer’s message to the American public. Yet two moves in the last week were emblematic of the issues the league faces in taking on the mantle of North America’s hosting of the game’s grandest stage.

A rising, under-the-radar homegrown player left for Europe, and a veteran with immense pedigree arrived, likely to close out his career. Sebastian Berhalter’s swapped title-chasing Vancouver Whitecaps for Middlesbrough of the EFL Championship. Free agent Brazil legend Casemiro traded Manchester’s Old Trafford for Nu Stadium in Miami.

World Boxing has stripped away the last restrictions on Russian competitors, clearing them to fight under their national flag rather than as neutrals, Reuters reported. The move brings the sport into line with a wider loosening across international competition, as the Olympic movement edges Russia back toward the Games while its war on Ukraine grinds on.

Boxing lifts the neutral-status rule

World Boxing's executive committee approved the change at a meeting that also discussed the allocation of major competitions in the 2027-29 cycle, which take in the qualifying route to the Los Angeles 2028 Games. 

 "The ExCo accepted that Russian athletes would now take part in World Boxing competitions like boxers from any other national federation," the body said.

he governing body attached only a monitoring commitment, none of it tied to the war. It said it would "strictly monitor the behaviour of Russian delegations during events as well as compliance with the anti-doping protocols." That pledge to police Russian anti-doping sits oddly beside Russia's own record, since WADA recently closed an eight-year case into the country's state-run doping program with hundreds of athlete sanctions.

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Sport keeps reopening its doors to Russia

The boxing decision follows the International Olympic Committee provisionally reinstating Russia's Olympic body this month, clearing Russia's path back toward the 2028 Los Angeles Games. It caps a run of federations doing the same through 2026: artistic gymnastics scrapped its restrictions in May, muaythai restored Russian flags and anthems alongside wrestling, judo, sambo and taekwondo days later, and tennis never dropped the neutral pathway at all.

Not every sport has bent the same way. World chess went in the opposite direction in June, when the International Chess Federation suspended the Russian Chess Federation, the first time it had stripped its most powerful member of its membership rights. 

• Infantino’s role as president under increasing pressure

• 143 of Fifa’s 211 members now stand against scheme

Gianni Infantino’s authority has been dealt a fresh blow after Carlos Cordeiro, one of his senior advisers, resigned with immediate effect in protest at proposals to sell a stake in the World Cup.

In the latest embarrassment for Infantino, who saw European FAs threaten to boycott future Fifa tournaments on Thursday, the former US Soccer chief Cordeiro criticised “a bad deal for football” and pointed out that the global governing body already sits on huge amounts of debt-free reserves.

Western sanctions and Ukrainian drones are squeezing Russia’s Black Sea trade in looted goods, but they are not stopping it. The networks are finding new routes—and one of them now runs through Georgia, a country that one day hopes to join the European Union.

A new study finds that ships arriving from Russian-occupied Ukrainian ports are turning up at Georgia’s port of Poti far more often than they used to.

The same links that allow Russia to profit give Europe leverage to disrupt those networks.

The numbers climb steeply: 22 visits in the second half of 2023, 68 in 2024, and 145 in the first half of 2025 alone—on course, the study estimates, to nearly five times the 2024 total. Türkiye’s ports still take most of this traffic, but Poti is rising fastest.

The increase has tracked the Georgian Dream government’s drift toward Moscow since a disputed October 2024 election, a slide the European Parliament condemned as evidence of state capture. The authors caution that they cannot yet prove the shift is the result of deliberate policy.

A $120 billion pipeline that reaches into Europe

The study, which maps how Russia sustains and profits from its war on Ukraine, was produced by the Serious Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme at the University of Birmingham and funded by the British government.

It follows goods moving through Black Sea shipping—worth about $120 billion a year—with military supplies flowing in and grain, coal, metal, and kaolin clay stripped from occupied territory flowing out, alongside oil sold above the price cap set by the Group of Seven in 2022. The study’s authors, Olivia Allison and Joshua Coyle, argue this trade is not a by-product of the war but an essential part of it, and one that reaches deep into European business.

The rerouting is happening under mounting pressure. Ukraine has spent 2026 hunting Russia’s Black Sea tankers and cargo ships, hitting 201 vessels in three weeks this July, according to the commander of its drone forces, Robert Brovdi, while the European Union and others tighten sanctions on the ports and ships involved.

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Grain is at the center of the trade. Investigators have documented Russia plundering the harvest in occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, relabeling it as Russian, and selling it on to buyers in the Middle East and Africa. Ukrainian authorities have been tracking multiple ships carrying that grain to Israel, Egypt, and Algeria.

The upheaval reaches the top of Russia’s own grain business. In January 2025, a Russian court handed Rodnye Polya—for years the country’s largest grain exporter—to the state, ruling that its owner, Petr Khodykin, could not legally hold a strategic asset because he was a citizen of both Saint Kitts and Nevis and Russia.

The seizure did not prove a windfall. After an earlier auction drew no bids, the state sold the company in July 2026 for 11.7 billion roubles (about $150 million)—a small fraction of its former annual revenue—to a little-known firm that, as Kommersant reported, was acting for a grain holding part-owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Oman.

A vulnerability that runs both ways

On both ends of the trade, the study argues, are European companies. One Turkish port that receives ships arriving straight from occupied Crimea is run by a firm with a Dutch parent and a Taiwanese ultimate owner. Vessels in the trade, meanwhile, have been repaired in European Union shipyards and fitted with European-made cranes.

That overlap, the authors write, cuts both ways: the same links that allow Russia to profit give Europe leverage to disrupt those networks. The bloc’s newest sanctions package has begun to use it, targeting the shadow fleet, banks, and firms selling stolen Ukrainian grain.

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Whether Georgia’s opening ports reflect a deliberate choice or simply the path of least resistance, the researchers do not say. Their data show only that the traffic keeps growing.

Akbar Majeed’s new feature tells the story of the sport through a Black lens and asks hard questions about the barriers facing the game’s breakthrough

Akbar Majeed takes a deep breath as he considers the legacy of the 2026 World Cup and, in particular, the effect of the US team’s collapse against Belgium for a last-16 exit.

“Unfortunately, that performance in the last game did not help at all,” he says.

• Family says Smith faced ‘dementia caused by CTE’

• College Football Hall of Famer played 10 NFL seasons

Former San Diego Chargers linebacker and College Football Hall of Famer Billy Ray Smith Jr has died. He was 64.

Smith’s family said in a statement Wednesday that Smith died following a bout with CTE-caused dementia.

• Mia Bieniemy is being treated for gunshot wounds

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The Kansas City Chiefs held their first full-squad workout of training camp Wednesday without offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, who remained with his family after the shooting of his wife – allegedly by their son – at their Virginia home last weekend.

Chiefs coach Andy Reid said after the workout that Mia Bieniemy had been released from the intensive care unit, where she was being treated for multiple gunshot wounds. But there was no timetable for when Eric Bieniemy would be back with the team.

Fifa president Gianni Infantino has announced plans to sell off stakes in the World Cup to private investors in a new commercial entity worth $20bn. One of the leading would-be investors is Joshua Kushner, brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared.

The plans have prompted an immediate backlash – with Uefa accusing Fifa of trying to ‘sell football’s soul’. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian reporter Paul MacInnes – watch on YouTube

• Deal would extend Argentinian through 2030 World Cup

• Coach would stand to earn ‘significantly’ more

• Pochettino’s tenure has been mixed bag of results

USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino and US Soccer are “in the final stages” of finalizing an agreement for a new contract through the 2030 World Cup, multiple sources briefed on ongoing negotiations have told the Guardian. Those sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Pochettino was brought on as US head coach in September 2024, tapped to lead the team through the 2026 World Cup, where the Americans suffered a disappointing exit in the last 16. Both sides had expressed interest in potentially extending the deal in the run-up to the tournament, with US Soccer chief executive JT Batson saying the federation was “excited” about the potential of building on progress made during Pochettino’s initial spell as head coach.

Russian strikes on Black Sea shipping have brought Ukraine’s grain corridor to its first full stop since it opened in August 2023, Ag Bull Trading reported. The freeze is splitting the price of wheat in two, pushing it down on Ukrainian farms even as it climbs abroad, Latifundist’s analysis found.

Rapeseed now sells for about $70 a ton less than it did a week earlier, and wheat at the farm is fetching roughly a fifth less than last autumn. Some buyers are cutting their offers overnight, market participants reported.

With ships no longer calling, traders have stopped buying, and grain that would have sailed has nowhere to go; the near-total halt of seaport trade has pushed prices down at the ports. More than 90% of Ukraine’s farm exports move through three deepwater Odesa ports.

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Carriers pull out as world prices climb

Maersk suspended service at a terminal in Chornomorsk’s fishing port and rerouted cargo to Romania’s Constanta, while the main ports and the corridor itself stayed open, as ThePublic reported; Hapag-Lloyd also paused its Chornomorsk calls.

On world exchanges, the same grain is moving the other way: Chicago wheat has jumped about 16% in July as attacks on Black Sea shipping stoke supply fears. Egypt, Algeria, and Indonesia together buy about 60% of Ukraine’s wheat, USDA figures show.

The freeze is splitting the price of wheat in two, pushing it down on Ukrainian farms even as it climbs abroad.

Grain piles up with nowhere to go

Seaborne farm exports have all but stopped, and with about 10 million metric tons of grain unsold from last season already competing for storage with the new crop, prices for growers keep sliding. The strain on the farm sector could turn critical within two to three months, the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council’s deputy head Denys Marchuk warned.

The state has imposed no restrictions—shipowners paused their own calls after a run of Russian strikes on civilian cargo ships, Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi told Latifundist.

He urged growers who can afford it to hold off selling, and said Ukraine may need to store an extra 10 to 12 million metric tons of grain it cannot ship, appealing to international partners for temporary storage capacity. The strikes went to the UN Security Council on 27 July, a session convened at Kyiv’s request.

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Growers face rising costs of their own—fuel, fertilizer, and equipment—and some are buying diesel on credit at about 87 hryvnias ($1.93) a liter, leaving little room to hold grain off a falling market.

Yet nothing has been formally closed. The deadliest strike came on 19 July, when Russian missiles hit the Golden Leo, a Turkish-owned bulk carrier, as it left Odesa loaded with grain, a strike killing 10. The corridor remains officially open. The harvest has fewer ways out.

Just three months after blocking it, the European Union has cleared raw Russian sable pelts to return to its market, according to Euractiv. The reversal sits inside the sanctions package Brussels adopted last week, after Italy and Greece pushed for the exemption. Coats made from the fur stay barred from the bloc.

A reprieve tucked into the toughest package yet

The bloc had caught sable in its sanctions net only in April. Now the exemption rides inside the 21st package of measures Brussels adopted last week, the round it promoted as its heaviest economic hit on Moscow to date. The change appears in the bloc's published sanctions text.

Euractiv says the European Commission defended the carve-out on supply grounds. It argued that Russia dominates the global sable market and that European makers have few alternative suppliers.

"Apparently, it's very difficult to get them anywhere else," a senior EU official told Euractiv. 

The sable is a small carnivorous animal from the forests of northern Asia, and its pelt is considered exceptionally soft and prized by luxury fashion houses. A single coat can run into the hundreds of thousands of euros. 

An EU diplomat told Euractiv that Italy and Greece drove the lobbying, the two biggest buyers of Russian pelts inside the bloc.

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Coats stay out as Europe debates its own farms

The sanctions still block finished fur garments in both directions — barred from entering the bloc and from reaching Russian buyers, The EU’s wider luxury-goods restrictions also cover products such as diamonds and caviar. Greece's fur producers, clustered around Kastoria and Siatista, fought those wartime measures in 2022, warning they would kill the industry. 

It lands as Brussels weighs a bloc-wide ban on its own fur farming, after a citizens' initiative demanded an end to the practice. Only a few EU countries, including Spain, Greece, Hungary, Finland, and Poland, still have active fur farms.

Russia’s strikes on civilian cargo ships have brought traffic through Ukraine’s Black Sea grain corridor—the route that carries the overwhelming share of the country’s farm exports—to a near-standstill at the peak of harvest.

Traders are buying less grain from farmers, prices are climbing, and Ukraine’s state railway has begun restricting grain shipments to Odesa’s ports. The UN Security Council meets on 27 July at Kyiv’s request.

This is not a blanket shutdown. The orders name specific shipments and destinations, and they hold until further notice.

Russian strikes drive the ships away

The corridor has not been formally closed. Shipowners simply stopped sending vessels in. Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said four or five ships entered Ukraine’s ports on 21 July and none by 22 July—the owners’ own decision, he stressed, not any Ukrainian restriction on navigation, he told Latifundist.

What stopped them was a run of Russian missile and drone strikes on the ships themselves. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said no vessel passed through the corridor on 22 July and that Russia had bombed at least three civilian cargo ships in the preceding days, killing and wounding dozens of crew.

“Russia is holding global food security hostage,” Sybiha wrote, comparing the campaign to Iran’s targeting of energy routes in the Strait of Hormuz.

The deadliest single strike came on 19 July, when three cruise missiles hit the Golden Leo, a Turkish-owned bulk carrier, as it left Odesa loaded with grain, killing ten.

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Ten dead as Russia strikes a Turkish-owned bulk carrier off Odesa

Over the past month, Russian strikes have damaged 28 ships bound to or from Greater Odesa’s ports, about 11–12% of the traffic, killing 21 seafarers and wounding 34, according to Andrii Klymenko’s tally at the Institute of Black Sea Strategic Studies monitoring group.

The disruption reaches Ukraine’s railways

Ukraine’s state railway has restricted grain shipments to Odesa’s ports, its restriction register shows. All freight to the Chornomorska-Export station serving the Odesa Port Plant was halted from 24 July. Barley bound for Louis Dreyfus Commodities Ukraine, one of the country’s three largest grain exporters, was restricted from 25 July, and wheat for the same firm from 26 July.

This is not a blanket shutdown. The orders name specific shipments and destinations, and they hold until further notice. The register gives no reason or volume, and Ukrzaliznytsia has not linked the orders to the shipping stoppage.

The squeeze on farmers predates the rail orders. Ukrainian traders were already cutting purchases from growers by 15 July, S&P Global reported, and one market source put cancellations at 30–40% of the shipowners due to call in late July and early August. “We won’t be trading as vessels cannot arrive at the port,” one Ukrainian seller told S&P Global.

Prices moved. December wheat on the Chicago exchange gained about $17 a metric ton in the week to 17 July, reaching $257, with the Black Sea escalation named as one of the drivers, AHDB reported. Russia and Ukraine together are forecast to supply more than 30% of the world’s wheat exports in 2026/27.

Who pays if the grain stops moving

Prolonged disruption would land hardest far from Ukraine. Egypt bought 2.4 million metric tons of Ukrainian wheat between July 2025 and February 2026; with Algeria and Indonesia, it took 60% of Ukraine’s wheat, while China, Türkiye, Libya, and Saudi Arabia bought 80% of its barley, USDA figures show.

The overland and river routes cannot make up the difference. Low water levels are limiting the Danube, Vysotskyi told Delo, and nothing can replace Ukraine’s deepwater ports in the medium term. If the delays hold, he said, Ukraine may have to store an extra 10 to 12 million metric tons of grain it cannot ship.

[L'article Le pont Gordie-Howe s’ouvre à la circulation à midi  a d'abord été publié dans InfoBref.]

Russia hit a civilian grain ship, waited, and hit it again. A Russian Shahed drone struck a Palau-flagged vessel carrying corn twice as it left a port in Odesa Oblast, setting it on fire, Ukraine's Minister for Restoration, Infrastructure and Transport Mykola Kalashnyk said. Two sailors are missing, and seven crew members and a Ukrainian pilot were rescued.

The double strike on a grain carrier is the maritime edge of Russia's campaign against Ukraine's food exports. The ship was carrying almost 2,800 tons of corn when it was hit as it left the port, and after the strikes, a fire broke out on board.

The State Border Guard Service, which carried out the rescue, reported that the vessel was leaving the mouth of the Danube bound from a Ukrainian port to Greece with nine crew and a pilot aboard when the Shahed hit it, then struck again, the second blast causing a large fire.

This is a deliberate attack on the civilian shipping that carries Ukrainian grain to world markets, and it fits a Russian campaign that has made ports and merchant ships a target through July.

"Russia continues deliberate attacks on civilian shipping and Ukraine's port infrastructure," Kalashnyk said.

The rescue pulled eight from a burning ship

The border guards' maritime security units rescued eight people after the double drone strike, the State Border Guard Service said. The sailors reacted quickly to the distress signal and evacuated eight from the burning vessel, all delivered to safety, with medics monitoring their condition.

The search continues for two crew members who went into the water after the first blast. The two accounts differ slightly on the totals, as they do in the first hours after any strike: Kalashnyk cited seven crew plus a Ukrainian pilot rescued, while the border guards counted eight evacuated. Both agree that two sailors are missing and a search-and-rescue operation is underway. What is confirmed is that a civilian grain ship was struck twice, caught fire, and lost two of its crew to the sea.

The strike is the maritime front of the grain war

The attack extends a campaign that has hammered Ukraine's grain export capacity through July.

From 11 to 15 July, Russian strikes hit three Greater Odesa ports and the merchant ships anchored there, cutting the region's grain-export capacity by roughly a third, according to Reuters. Odesa's ports carry more than 90% of Ukraine's agricultural exports.

Wheat in Chicago is at a two-year high, and southern Russia is bringing in its best harvest in years—yet Russian farmers are heading into the season earning less, not more.

Ukraine’s drone campaign in the Sea of Azov closed the Kerch Strait to shipping on 10 July, trapping the route that carries a quarter of Russia’s grain and sunflower-oil exports. Export duties and soaring logistics skim what still moves, and the grain piling up in full elevators is crushing prices at home while the world price climbs out of reach.

Russia is now heading for its weakest July wheat exports in nine years.

“Farmers should be receiving payment for half or all of their wheat harvest and putting that money back into circulation. But there is no one to sell to.”

Ural-Don agricultural holding president Alexander Yaroshenko

The weakest July in nine years

Russia may export 1.5 million tons of wheat this July—half its five-year average for the month and the lowest July volume since 2017, the SovEcon analytical center forecast on 20 July, its second cut in a week after analysts had already reduced July estimates by 13–20%, Kommersant reported.

The IKAR agricultural institute expects under two million tons. Both name the same main cause: navigation limits through the Kerch Strait, beyond which a quarter of Russia’s grain and sunflower-oil exports ship, according to SovEcon, with weak demand from Egypt and Türkiye adding pressure.

Russia shut the strait on 10 July after Ukrainian drones struck vessels across the Sea of Azov, including tankers—a closure Moscow imposed on itself because the water had become too dangerous to cross.

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The backlog is already physical: grain exports down the Don River—27% of Russia’s grain exports last season—have stopped entirely, elevators at the Don ports are full, and agreed export contracts are collapsing because cargo cannot ship, industry figures told the Rostov business outlet Gorod N.

“Active trading should be picking up right now. Farmers should be receiving payment for half or all of their wheat harvest and putting that money back into circulation. But there is no one to sell to,” Ural-Don agricultural holding president Alexander Yaroshenko told the outlet.

The price rally Russia cannot collect

September wheat in Chicago gained more than 10% in a week, touching two-year highs, while Paris wheat hit a 17-month high, SovEcon director Andrei Sizov noted. “The market is starting to understand this is not the typical short-lived Black Sea rally,” the Financial Times quoted him as saying—this time, export estimates for both Russia and Ukraine may be cut substantially.

The Ukrainian half of that warning is already happening. Russia struck back at Ukraine’s grain gateways the same week: massed attacks on Chornomorsk on 10–12 July forced Kernel, Ukraine’s largest grain exporter, to halt terminal operations, with about 45,000 tons of wheat and 9,000 tons of sunflower oil lost or damaged—leaving Ukraine’s deep-water grain exports with almost nowhere to go.

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Russia’s port strikes leave Ukraine’s grain with almost nowhere else to go

Both of the Black Sea’s grain suppliers are choked at once—the reason, in Sizov’s reading, is that the market has stopped treating this as a passing rally.

The tension raises world prices, and the money goes to Russia’s competitors. Russian farmers are fenced off from their own rally twice—a floating export duty skims the price above them, and logistics costs climb as grain hunts for other routes. Ruble prices will stay under strong pressure, Sizov wrote on Telegram.

Why rerouting does not save the season

Russia’s deep-water ports beyond the strait can ship 4–4.5 million tons of grain a month—enough for July, but at the season’s peak in August through October, Russia normally ships 5–6.5 million tons a month, Sizov calculates on Telegram.

The industry agrees from the ground: the Black Sea ports cannot physically handle southern Russia’s seasonal volumes, and the railways to them were not built for it, Yaroshenko told Gorod N—while a grain trader told the same outlet that rerouting would jam rail approaches to Novorossiysk for months. The shallow Azov ports are not a convenience; they are the margin between Russia’s export capacity and its harvest.

And this year, the domestic market has more grain than usual to absorb. SovEcon expects the southern crop—grown in exactly the regions that ship through Azov—to rise 17.2% from last year. The best harvest is arriving in the provinces with the most blocked ports.

The long clock

The squeeze works through margins. Falling farm profitability is already cutting sowing—wheat area this year is the lowest since 2014, Forbes reported—and Sizov expects the trend to worsen in 2027.

The market is pricing the decay in real time: Rodnye Polya, once Russia’s largest grain exporter, was sold this month for 11.7 billion rubles ($150 million) to a little-known holding company, and terminal incomes will decline as the grain market’s export potential shrinks, Sizov told Kommersant.

Put together, the mechanism runs in one direction. Blocked ports overfill the domestic market; the surplus crushes the prices farmers live on; falling margins cut next year’s sowing; smaller harvests shrink the exports that made Russia the world’s top wheat supplier. The world, meanwhile, is already paying two-year-high prices to buy its wheat elsewhere—and the longer this runs, the more of Russia’s market share moves to the competitors the rally is enriching.

Russia struck a foreign-flagged civilian bulk carrier with cruise missiles as it left Odesa loaded with grain, killing much of its crew, Ukraine's Navy said. Fire broke out aboard the ship, and a search-and-rescue operation ran through the night to reach survivors. Ukrainian officials condemned the strike as another deliberate attack on unarmed civilian shipping.

Three cruise missiles hit the ship as it sailed out

Russian forces fired three Kh-59/Kh-69 cruise missiles at the GOLDEN LEO, a Guinea-Bissau-flagged bulk carrier owned by a Turkish company, as it moved out of the combat zone with a cargo of corn on 19 July, Ukraine's Navy reported. The strike hit the starboard side of the superstructure, and a fire broke out on board.

The missiles came in from the sea. Ukraine's Air Force warned of Russian missiles approaching Odesa and Chornomorsk from the Black Sea in the late afternoon, minutes before explosions were heard in the city. The ship took serious damage but did not sink, the Odesa outlet Dumska showed in photos from the scene, as tugs and rescue crews fought to keep it afloat.

The toll climbed to 10 overnight, including a Ukrainian sea pilot

The death toll rose through the night. The Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority (USPA) said 10 people were killed, among them a Ukrainian sea pilot from its Delta-Pilot branch, and that eight crew members were rescued and brought ashore. A sea pilot boards a vessel to guide it safely in and out of port through difficult or dangerous waters.

Eighteen people were on board: crew members from Syria and India, along with the Ukrainian pilot. Eight of the rescued were taken to an Odesa hospital, two of them injured. By Monday, the USPA said the fire aboard the ship had been contained.

Ukraine calls it terror against civilian shipping

The Navy says the strike was an act of terror and a violation of the laws of war. 

"This is another deliberate Russian strike on an unarmed civilian vessel under a foreign flag that posed no military threat," it said. "The attack is an act of terror against peaceful shipping and a gross violation of international humanitarian law."

Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi instructed the Foreign Ministry to immediately inform the states whose citizens were affected and Ukraine's international partners. The government and military command are separately preparing measures meant to strengthen the safety of shipping and shield civilian vessels and sailors from Russian attacks.

The strike lands in a month when Russia has been hammering the Odesa ports that carry the overwhelming share of Ukraine's farm exports. Russian forces have repeatedly gone after foreign-flagged ships moving through the maritime corridor, and used Geran-4 drones against grain carriers at Chornomorsk earlier in July.

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Ukraine's drones widened their assault on Russia's sanctions-dodging shadow fleet overnight on 17 July, hitting 12 more vessels in the Black Sea, according to Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi. The same night, drones struck occupied Kerch and Berdiansk, and satellites logged fires at Crimea's main rail hub as the campaign to cut the peninsula off from Russia pressed on.

Twelve more ships in a single night

Brovdi said his operators hit nine dry-cargo ships, one tanker, one gas carrier, and one tug in the Black Sea. The strikes ran under the codename MoLoChKa, a Ukrainian term for dairy products.

He put the 6–17 July total at 159 vessels of Russia's shadow fleet across both seas. Of those, 117 were hit in the Sea of Azov and 42 in the Black Sea.

Brovdi vowed the operation would run without end. Moscow will fall, he wrote, promising Ukraine would "feed and rebuild" Crimea once the peninsula is retaken.

A day earlier, the Security Service of Ukraine's Mamai sea drones struck two shadow-fleet crude tankers in the same waters. The wider drive has already pushed the fight out of the Azov shallows and into the open Black Sea. 

Isolation of Crimea continues

While the ships burned at sea, drones hit occupied Crimea from about 21:40 until morning, the monitoring Telegram channel Krymsky Veter reported. Residents heard explosions in at least Kerch, Simferopol, Feodosia, and Yevpatoria.

By morning, OSINT channels recorded a cluster of fires at Kerch's railway station, near the Crimean Bridge, and NASA FIRMS satellite data confirmed a blaze in the area, the monitoring channel Exilenova+ said. Early reports pointed to burning warehouses, rail wagons on the tracks, and possibly the Kerch oil depot and the Kerchenska electrical substation, though none of that was confirmed.

Monitoring channels also logged a fire near Shchebetivka, by the Koktebel substation, after drones reportedly struck a pumping station and the 110/35/6 kV facility there.

Crimea's supply lines under strain

The Kerch rail yard has grown critically overloaded as Ukrainian strikes hammer the peninsula's rail network. Two days earlier, occupation authorities in the northern city of Dzhankoi restricted mobile service to 16 hours a day amid power disruptions.

In occupied Berdiansk, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukrainian strike drones hit energy infrastructure, sparking a fire, Exilenova+ said in a separate overnight report, sharing a video of the resulting fire.

The sea and rail strikes fit a longer effort to sever Crimea by cutting the fuel, transport, and energy links that sustain the occupation. 

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