Smuggled grain from Russia has found a new market in Saudi Arabia. Thus, this country has joined Iran, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Venezuela and Yemen, which accept Ukrainian grain stolen by the Russians, the publication says.
Its authors tracked, in particular, the movements of the bulk carrier Krasnodar in 2025 from the port in Sevastopol in the temporarily occupied Crimea to two ports in Saudi Arabia: in September – to the port named after King Abdullah, in November – to the port of Jazan.
Investigators note that the ship approached Crimea with the identification system (AIS) turned off and turned it on again on the approach to Turkey, before entering the Bosphorus Strait.
In another case, the Krasnodar, without an AIS signal, reached from Sevastopol to the Kerch Strait, turned on AIS there, and after that set off for the Bosphorus.
Satellite photos provide evidence that the ship was loading at a grain terminal in Sevastopol.
The Russian company Petrokhleb Kuban told Bellingcat that it “categorically denies any allegations of involvement in the theft of grain from Ukrainian regions” and allegedly does not export grain from the Avlita terminal to any country, while Krasnodar allegedly “complies with all generally accepted security protocols and does not disable its AIS system during the transition.”
According to the Russians, the AIS signal is being jammed in the Black Sea due to the war.
“Bellingcat analyzed AIS data from vessels passing near Krasnodar. On both voyages, Krasnodar was the only vessel in the area that stopped transmitting AIS data for this period of time,” the investigators commented.
Context
According to Ukrainian authorities, only in the first three months after the start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian occupiers approximately 0.5 million tons were stolen grains from territories in Kharkov, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions.
According to the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, in 2022, Russian occupiers took hundreds of thousands of tons of grain from the temporarily occupied areas of Zaporozhye, Kherson and Nikolaev regions to Crimea and transported them for sale to Turkey, Syria and Lebanon.
Later it became known that the Russians were exporting Ukrainian grain to Iran.
