As of September 26, 2023, 50 of the 100 ships that were there at the time of the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, remain blocked in Ukrainian seaports. 42 of these vessels belong to foreign shipowners, Andriy Klymenko, the head of the Monitoring Group of the Black Sea Strategic Research Institute, stated.
29 ships are in the ports of the Mykolaiv region, 14 in Kherson and five in Mariupol. For various reasons, two sea vessels from the number of 41, which were blocked on February 24, 2022, remain in the ports of Odesa region, Klymenko wrote.
It is noted that out of the mentioned 50 ships, 15 belong to ship-owning companies from EU countries (eight of them from Greece, three from Malta, and one ship each from Bulgaria, Germany, Estonia andDenmark. 14 ship owners are from Turkey, and other eight are from Ukraine.
Among other shipowners are companies from Norway and China, Great Britain, Montenegro, Bangladesh, Marshall Islands, Lebanon, Egypt and Singapore, Klymenko added.
In August and September five ships that had been there since the beginning of the large-scale war were able to leave the ports of the Odesa region through the temporary corridor in the Black Sea declared by Ukraine.
The corridor established by the navigation mandate of the Armed Forces Navy is primarily used for the evacuation of ships that were in the Ukrainian ports of Chornomorsk, Odesa and Pivdenny at the time of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation.
The complete unblocking of ports for all types of cargo will make it possible not only to return Ukraine to the status of a maritime state, but also to bring to the Ukrainian economy additional tens of billions of dollars in foreign exchange revenue per year, to the state budget – hundreds of billions of hryvnias in additional tax revenues, and to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians – jobs and stable income to the family budget.
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