23 October 2026, Kyiv: Ukraine is in active talks with Turkey, India and Egypt over a new arrangement to reopen safe shipping through the Black Sea, after Russian strikes since August have cut the country’s grain export capacity to just 38 percent of its normal volume, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a Bloomberg interview.
Ukraine’s Black Sea ports are its primary route for agricultural exports and can handle up to 40 million tons of grain in a typical marketing season. Shipments through the ports have been effectively halted since August because of Russian air attacks on port infrastructure and on commercial vessels. The strikes followed Ukrainian attacks earlier in the summer on Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, tankers that largely carry sanctioned oil and fuel products, after which Ukrainian civilian port infrastructure came under intensified Russian bombardment.
A Three-Country Safe Passage Proposal, Rejected So Far by Russia
According to Zelenskyy, Turkey, India and Egypt have proposed a specific mechanism to restart safe navigation: vessels flying the flags of those three countries would be permitted to call at both Ukrainian and Russian ports to carry food, with an understanding that neither side’s ships would be attacked. Zelenskyy described the arrangement simply as one ship sailing to a Ukrainian port and another to a Russian one, under a mutual non-strike guarantee. He said the three countries have repeatedly appealed to Moscow on Ukraine’s behalf, but that Russia has rejected the proposal and no agreement has yet been reached.
The story was independently reported by multiple outlets, including India’s Business Today, Turkish Minute and Azerbaijan’s Report.az, all citing the same Zelenskyy remarks, which indicates the diplomatic effort is being closely watched well beyond Ukraine and Russia. Zelenskyy also said Ukraine has asked the European Union to reinstate the “solidarity lanes,” the rail and land export routes set up after Russia’s 2022 invasion, because rail alone cannot replace the volume the Black Sea ports normally handle. “We cannot manage this volume of shipments by rail,” he said.
The choice of Turkey, India and Egypt as the proposed guarantor states is notable. All three are major buyers of either Ukrainian or Russian grain, or both, and none is formally aligned with either side of the war in a way that would make their flagged vessels an obvious military target. For Russia, accepting the arrangement would mean tacitly allowing food shipments to resume from a country it is actively bombarding; for Ukraine, it offers a route to export income and global market share that rail and European land corridors cannot fully replace. As of this week, Russia has not agreed to any of the proposed options, according to Zelenskyy, and the Black Sea route remains effectively closed to the bulk of Ukraine’s normal grain trade.
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