Russia for the first time on Monday attacked a port on the Danube River in Ukraine, near the border with Romania, Ukrainian and Romanian officials said, destroying a grain hangar in an escalation of its efforts to cripple Kyiv’s agriculture and risking a more direct confrontation with the United States and its European allies.
The attack on the port in the town of Reni, across the river from Romania, a NATO member, targeted Kyiv’s alternative export routes for grain to reach world markets, days after Russia terminated an agreement that allowed Ukraine to ship its grain to the Black Sea. The attack was Moscow’s closest strike on military alliance territory since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.
The port strike comes in the middle of the two drone attacks in central Moscow on Monday morning that Russian officials blamed on Ukrainian forces. At least two nonresidential buildings were hit around 4 a.m. local time, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging app. He added that there were no “serious injuries or casualties.”
Ukrainian and Romanian officials denounced the port strike, including President Klaus Iohannis of Romania condemning the attack on Ukrainian infrastructure close to his country’s borders. He said on Twitter that the “recent escalation poses a serious security risk in the Black Sea,” as well as affecting Ukrainian grain shipments and global food security.
Romania’s Defense Ministry said it was maintaining an “enhanced vigilance” posture with its allies on the eastern side of the alliance. But the ministry added in a statement that “there is no potential direct military threat against our national territory or Romanian territory.”
Since the Kremlin pulled out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative last week, its forces have launched a series of almost nightly attacks on the city of Odesa — which is about 130 miles from Reni — and its Black Sea port, destroying grain stocks and infrastructure. Those attacks, along with Moscow’s warning that it will consider any ship approaching Ukraine’s Black Sea ports as potentially carrying military cargo, have made Ukraine’s alternative grain routes even more important.
Ukraine, a major producer of grain and other food crops, exports about two million metric tons of grain each month through its ports on the Danube, according to Benoît Fayaud, the deputy executive director of Stratégie Grains, an agricultural economics research company.
An attack on Reni, about 70 miles from the coast, could deter commercial vessels from using the port in the short term and raise the cost of insurance, Mr. Fayaud said.
Global wheat prices rose about 5.5 percent in Monday morning trade.
The attacks on Moscow and the Danube come amid a grinding war that has seen Ukraine mount a slow-moving counter-offensive to retake territory seized by Russian forces. Kyiv rarely admits to attacking Russian territory far from the front line, but the drone strike on Moscow was not the first since the war began.
In May, eight drones targeted Moscow, the Russian capital, smashing windows in three residential buildings and injuring two residents, according to officials. The strikes confronted Muscovites with the reality of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which President Vladimir V. Putin has worked hard to shield from their daily lives. That attack came after Russian forces launched another in a series of overnight attacks on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
After Monday’s drone attack, videos verified by The New York Times showed damage in at least two locations near the Moskva River in southern Moscow. One building that was hit was about a block from the Russian National Defense Management Center, an imposing structure used to conduct “centralized combat management of the Russian armed forces,” according to the ministry’s website.
Smoke can be seen rising from the upper floors of a high-rise that houses a French home-improvement chain. Other footage showed damage to several structures along Komsomolsky Prospect — an avenue that runs through one of the most upscale parts of central Moscow and near the Defense Ministry — including the building housing the Military University and the Central Military Band, a performance group of the Russian Armed Forces.
It was not determined if the drones caused the damage. But authorities blocked off part of Komsomolsky Prospect after finding one of the drones there, state news media reported. Russian authorities said they destroyed two drones.
Later on Monday, another drone crashed near a residential building in Moscow’s Pervomaiskoe district, but no injuries were immediately reported, according to local news outlets.
The attack on the Danube port took place within four hours, Oleh Kiper, the head of the regional military administration in that area of Ukraine, wrote in Telegram. Ukraine’s air defenses shot down three drones, he said, adding that seven people were injured, three from shrapnel. One had serious injuries.
Mike Lee, director of Green Square Agro Consultancy, which specializes in the Black Sea and Eastern Europe, called the Reni attack a “massive escalation” by Moscow in terms of its impact on Ukraine’s ability to use alternative routes for its exports.
Russia last year shelled western Ukraine near the border with Poland, also a NATO member, but did not hit Ukrainian facilities so close to territory covered by the military alliance’s pledge to jointly respond to an attack on a member state. NATO and Poland have said what detonated a few miles outside Ukraine’s border in November was likely a remnant of a Ukrainian surface-to-air missile, though US and NATO officials still blame Russia as the aggressor.
Russian war cheerleaders hailed the port strikes as a further step toward destroying Ukraine’s economy and blocking what they described as arms deliveries to the West.
They say Kyiv is taking advantage of the port’s proximity to NATO territory — and the fact that ships can approach it along the Danube without navigating Ukrainian waters in the Black Sea — as a means of continuing to export grain and other wartime goods.
“They seem to be blocking this way of circumventing the sea blockade of Kyiv,” a Russian talk show host, Olga Skabeyeva, said on Rossiya state television channel. “And soon they will completely deny Ukraine access to the Black Sea.”
A popular war blog, known as Rybar, also claimed that the port of Reni is used to supply the Ukrainian military, along with the export of grain.
On Monday, the FSB, Russia’s successor to the KGB, claimed it had evidence that Ukraine imported explosives in May across the Black Sea at one of its ports on the Danube. The claim cannot be independently verified.
The Danube River delta, a network of waterways that crosses the border region of Moldova, Romania and Ukraine, was rarely used to export Ukrainian grains before the invasion, but in the past year, it has become indispensable.
The grain deal first struck by the United Nations and Turkey last year covered a trio of major Black Sea ports, and allowed Ukraine to ship more than 30 million tons of grain. At the same time, smaller ports on the Danube that were not part of the deal were able to send shipments that went to the Black Sea and to international destinations.
Those routes – as well as land routes – became important after Russia ended the Black Sea deal, saying its demands had to be met. Moscow complained bitterly that the deal was biased towards Kyiv and that Western sanctions restricting the sale of its own agricultural products should be lifted, among other demands.
The United Nations says Russia’s attempts to curb Ukraine’s exports will worsen the hunger crisis facing several countries in Africa and the Middle East. Ukraine exports grain by road and rail to European Union countries, as well as through Danube ports.
Since the start of the war, Ukraine has shipped more than 20 million tons of grain to foreign markets via Romania and millions more by rail via Poland, an influx that has angered Eastern European farmers who say it has depressed local prices. After protests in several EU countries, the bloc allowed Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia to ban domestic sales of Ukrainian wheat, corn, rapeseed and sunflower seeds, although it continued to allow those items to be moved for export elsewhere.
The ban is expected to end on September 15. Last week, ministers from those five countries called for the bans to be extended.
On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed back on that idea, telling Telegram that extending the ban was “unacceptable in any form.”
Yurii Shyvala, Anton Troyanovski and Gabriela Sá Pessoa contributed reporting.
