Dmytro Krymsky, co-founder of Goodwine, estimates that strikes in the past three weeks have cost Ukrainian businesses around $500m. NOT SINCE the first days of the war have shoppers in Kyiv faced empty supermarket shelves. Now they are once again. On July 19th a Russian ballistic missile slammed into a warehouse supplying the upmarket Goodwine store. Two weeks later strikes on two distribution hubs of Silpo, a larger chain, killed six workers. Nova Poshta, the private postal service on which most of Ukraine depends, has been hit repeatedly. More troubling is Russia’s new tactic of hunting civilian cargo ships that use Ukraine’s Black Sea ports—threatening a far larger share of the economy.
Threatened at the war’s start, the deep-sea ports reopened first with a Turkish-brokered grain deal, and then with a protected corridor for Ukraine in 2023. Ukraine’s general staff says it has caused $13.5bn-worth of losses to Russia’s refining industry since August 2025. Dragon Capital, a Ukrainian investment firm, estimates the blockade will cost the country around 0.6% of GDP this year.
Ukraine says the company ships equipment for Vladimir Putin’s war. “The strikes hurt, but not where or on the timescale Ukraine claims,” he says. It is also an answer to Ukraine’s own drone strikes deep inside Russia. These have hit defence plants and oil infrastructure, closed the Sea of Azov to Russian shipping and burned warehouses of Wildberries, Russia’s e-commerce giant. But the choking now runs both ways, and Ukraine is more vulnerable. Odessa’s ports, the country’s economic lifeline, were the first to feel the pressure. Russia kept targeting port infrastructure, but shippers tolerated the risk, moving 210m tonnes over the following three years. The calculus changed in mid-July when Russia began hunting the ships themselves. On July 19th cruise missiles hit and sank a Turkish-owned cargo ship as it left Chornomorsk, one of three big ports in the region. Ten people were killed. A few ships still dare make the run, but the ports are commercially dead. Both sides inflate statistics. Sergei Vakulenko of the Carnegie Endowment, a think-tank, reckons the real, immediate losses to business is perhaps one-tenth of that, and that it has barely touched state income. Most worrying for Ukraine is Russia’s blockade of its sea exports. Ukraine cannot fully reciprocate. For that reason, Russia is likely to keep it up, regardless of diplomacy.
Since then every vessel entering or leaving Odessa has been targeted.
They might,” says a Ukrainian security source. Mr Krymsky says business is adapting. “A colleague was telling me how they had a big meeting yesterday called Autumn Actions, about future plans,” he says. “Today it already has a new name: Survive Till April.”
This year, Ukraine has defied the odds and regained battlefield momentum. Unless Ukraine finds a reliable source of ballistic interceptors, its economy and military prospects will take a serious hit. Western partners will need to step up support. The worst-case scenario being whispered in Kyiv is that Russian strikes on energy, water sources and perhaps even sewage will force mass emigration. “Would they go that far?
Its progress was always likely to slow as winter approached; in the event, the pressure has arrived earlier.
