A pilot was killed, a bulker was damaged and three of its Filipino crew members were injured during a Russian missile attack at a port in the Odesa region, the Ukrainian government said on Wednesday.
“A civilian vessel carrying iron ore to China was damaged today,” the country’s vice prime minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
According to the Ukrainian official, one person was killed and three crew members of the unidentified vessel suffered injuries.
According to a separate Telegram message by the Defence Forces of Southern Ukraine, the deceased person is the pilot who was helping steer the Liberia-flagged vessel into port when the attack happened.
“The rocket hit the superstructure of the civilian vessel,” the military said.
Ukrainian website Dumskaya identified the damaged ship as the 91,900-dwt bulker Kmax Ruler (built 2009).
The vessel is said to have taken the blow at 4.44pm local time (1400 GMT), as it was entering a port in the Odesa region, possibly at Yuzhnyy/Pivdennyi. Experts interviewed by Dumskaya said the Russian rocket may have been drawn by the vessel’s working radio.
TradeWinds understands that the Kmax Ruler’s three seafarers have not suffered any serious injuries.
The incident happened during a Russian missile attack on the Odesa port infrastructure. Such strikes are commonplace since Moscow got out of a United Nations-led safety corridor for the seaborne export of Ukrainian grain in July.
“This is already the 21st targeted attack by Russia after it left the [UN-led] grain agreement,” Kubrakov said.
Ukraine has since managed to set up an alternative corridor since, protected by its own arms. As TradeWinds reported earlier on Wednesday, more than 65 vessels have already left Ukraine under the corridor and more than 30 are inbound.
Those include all kinds of bulkers, from small cargo ships to capesizes, with an average size of about 44,000 dwt.
About one-fifth of the Ukrainian cargo that left the country so far has been delivered to Spanish ports, with Egypt a close runner-up and Turkey, Romania and Italy further behind.
Some owners have been particularly active.
The busiest by far is Germany’s Blumenthal JMK, which used the corridor to extract from Ukraine two trapped vessels and send in another 10 from outside.
