Ukraine Asks Romanian Port to Allow Ship-to-ship Grain Transfers
Ukraine’s Danube Shipping Company (DSC) has asked Romania’s Constanta Black Sea port to allow ship-to-ship grain transfers which would almost double its barge export capacity, the company said on Monday.A major grower and exporter, Ukraine’s 2023 grain output is seen at up to 56 million metric tons but a blockade of its major Black Sea ports since Russia’s invasion in February 2022 has constrained shipments.Ukraine’s Danube river ports, which previously accounted for around a quarter of grain exports, are now the main route out for the country’s harvest, some of which is sent on barges to Cons
UDP Inks Deal to Upgrade the Engines of Its Pushboat Fleet
Ukrainian shipping company PJSC Ukrainian Danube Shipping Company (UDP) signed a letter of intent (LOI) with Belgian engine manufacturer Anglo-Belgian Corporation NV (ABC) to modernize its pushboat fleet.The LOI signed under the auspices of the Embassy of Belgium in Ukraine provides UDP with the possibility to install hybrid engines with equipment provided by ABC for up to 33 UDP pushboats. The fleet modernization would enable UDP to prolong the life of outdated fixed assets and…
River Cruisers Get Wastewater Treatment Upgrade
ACO Marine has been awarded contracts to supply its wastewater treatment technology as retrofit solutions to river cruise vessels operating on European waterways. The 232-passenger capacity sisters Ukraina and Moldavia, undergoing refit work at the Ukrainian Danube Shipping Company’s fleet maintenance base in Izmail, Ukraine, will each be retrofitted with a Maripur NF 250 unit. In a separate agreement, a Maripur NF 150 unit will also be supplied to Linz Shipyard for retrofit to the 150-passenger capacity river cruise vessel Carissima. Due to space limitations aboard all these vessels, ACO Marine will use the ships’ existing holding tanks as a bioreactor in the first stage of the treatment process.
Russia Supplies Syria Mission with Turkey's Old Cargo Ships
Earlier this year, an old refrigerator ship called the Georgiy Agafonov, built to transport fruit and vegetables for the Soviet Union, was quietly gathering rust in the Ukrainian port of Izmail where the Danube flows into the Black Sea. Its owners, a Ukrainian state company, assumed it would never sail again. When a Turkish company offered to buy it for $300,000, they watched as the hulk was towed away, presumably for scrap. Nine months later the ship is back at sea, renamed Kazan-60, reflagged as part of Russia's naval auxiliary fleet, and repurposed as an unlikely part of Moscow's biggest military operation outside the old Soviet boundaries since the Cold War.
Shipping Company's Losses Total $110M
Ukraine's Danube Shipping Company lost $110 million due to military action in Yugoslavia last year that destroyed bridges and blocked traffic along the Danube, transport minister Leonid Kostyuchenko said. NATO launched air strikes last year on Yugoslavia, which it accused of ethnic cleansing in the province of Kosovo, densely populated by ethnic Albanians. Kostyuchenko said collapsed bridges had blocked 63 Ukrainian ships on upper stretches of the Danube. Due to the disruption of the shipping, Ukraine's Danube ports were now working at just 40 percent of capacity, he said. This is not the first time Ukrainian companies suffer from problems in Yugoslavia.
