Russia bombs Danube River ports 200 meters from Romania, NATO’s outer limit. Attack aims to do more than sabotage Ukrainian grain exports, but Western alliance reacts with reticence.
(DW) At daybreak, tiny dots appear in the Romanian sky, accompanied by the growing roar of engines: they are drones approaching. The boatmen on the Danube River first react in disbelief, then in panic, filming with their cell phones: “They’re going to explode here,” one of the men exclaims, “it’s going to fall right into the harbor!”
Then, a few hundred meters away, first the flash of a fireball was seen, then a violent detonation was heard. “Let’s run, people, the war has started right in front of Romania!” one of the boatmen shouts.
On the morning of July 24, 2023, Russia sends 15 Iranian Shahed-136 drones to the river port of Reni in Ukraine. Some are shot down by Ukrainian air defense, others explode, destroying warehouses and granaries full of grain, and leaving seven injured.
A Romanian cargo ship is also damaged. The port of Izmail, upriver, is also targeted, but without success. Until then, Russia’s war in Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, had never advanced so close to the external border of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Reni lies in the Ukraine-Romania-Moldova triangle, about 120 kilometers west of the mouth of the Danube into the Black Sea. From the destroyed port, it is about 200 meters to the middle of the river, where the state border of Romania, and therefore a NATO member state, is located. Another 200 meters and you reach the Romanian bank.
The Moldovan port of Giurgiulești is only five kilometers upriver, while the Romanian metropolis of Galați, with its 220,000 inhabitants, is ten kilometers as the crow flies. It was therefore a matter of luck that the inaccurate Shared drones did not hit the territory of the Atlantic alliance.
Putin wants to halt Ukrainian grain exports
The offensive against Reni is the latest step in the escalation of Moscow’s bomb terrorism, inaugurated just over a week ago in the Black Sea port cities of Odessa and Mykolaiv, and directed mainly against Ukraine’s grain export infrastructure.
Earlier, Russian missiles had already crossed a stretch of Romanian airspace; debris fell on the Republic of Moldova; a projectile ended up in a Polish forest. Until then, however, the aggressor had never waged an intentional offensive so close to NATO’s external border, even more so against a civilian target, in an area without major military infrastructure.
“Vladimir Putin wants to paralyze Ukraine’s grain exports by all means, and at the same time take revenge for the failure to suspend certain sanctions on Russia, for example against the banking sector,” says political scientist Armand Gosu, who teaches Russian and Soviet history and diplomacy at the University of Bucharest and is one of Romania’s leading experts on Russia and the post-Soviet space.
Ukraine urgently needs grain and oilseed revenues, and until now had three export routes. The largest volume came from the ports of Odessa and Mykolaiv via the Black Sea route, even after the Russian invasion in February 2022, thanks to an agreement with Moscow under international mediation. After its expiration on July 17, however, Putin refused to extend it.
Since the beginning of the invasion, another part has reached world markets overland, through Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland. The third route is through the Danube delta, passing both through the Ukrainian ports of Reni and Izmail and through a stretch of the Black Sea belonging to Romanian territorial waters. Kiev intends to expand this third route in particular.
Danube bombings also aim for psychological effect
Although remote and difficult to reach by land, the river port of Reni, in the far southwest of the country, offers better access to the nautical route. From there, large cargo ships reach the Black Sea via Romania’s Sulina canal, the arm of the Danube delta best extended for navigation.
Izmail – population 70,000, on the Kiliya arm of the delta – is more accessible by land, but only a few large ships are able to dock there. A project to increase the depth of certain stretches of the Danube in this region, for example the Novostambulske-Bystroye canal, is only moving slowly and has been a contentious issue between Bucharest and Kiev for many years.
Compared to the Black Sea route from Odessa and Mykolaiv, so far only a fraction of Ukrainian grain could be exported from Danubian ports. From this point of view, the risk for Russia of bombing Reni seems much greater than any benefits, due to its location directly on the NATO border.
According to political scientist Gosu, however, there is much more at stake in the offensive than just halting grain exports: “Putin wants to show that he doesn’t care how close his attacks are to NATO territory. What’s more, his goal is to expose NATO’s indecisiveness.”
With reticence, NATO contributes to cynical game
Romanian public opinion reacted with horror and deep concern to the bombing of the ports of Reni and Izmail. Not only because the war has advanced so close to their territory: the Danube delta is a region whose inhabitants on both sides have strong reciprocal ties, historically, linguistically and culturally. More than half of Reni’s 18,000 inhabitants, for example, are ethnic Romanians.
In contrast to the population, official reactions from Bucharest have been strangely reticent. President Klaus Iohannis only briefly tweeted that he harshly condemned Russian raids near Romania. The Defense Ministry merely reported that “there are no direct military threats from the national territory”.
NATO, for its part, has so far not taken a position. It is true that the NATO-Ukraine Council has been meeting for more than a week, since the wave of Russian bombings against Odessa and Mykolaiv. However, there has been no condemnation or warning to Moscow for the attacks in the vicinity of the Western military alliance’s border.
Armand Gosu believes that NATO “wants to avoid escalation at any price”: “Western elites are now war-weary, and fear a collapse of Russia more than a defeat of Ukraine.” That’s why support for Kiev falls short of what is needed.
“It is not because of Russia that there will be a long, frozen conflict in Ukraine, but because the West does not provide enough weapons,” the Romanian political scientist predicts. “It’s a cynical game.”