The first grain ship leaves Odessa under a UN-brokered deal

26,000 tonnes of corn, the , a cargo ship registered in Sierra Leone, set sail from the Ukrainian on August 1st. The transit, Ukraine’s first maritime export since Russia invaded in February, was made possible by a deal the two countries reached in July. “I understand what war is,” the ship’s Syrian captain, Mohammad Abdoh, told Ukrainian officials a few days earlier, “and I am ready to go.” The is headed to Lebanon. At least ten other ships, among the dozens trapped in Ukrainian ports since the start of the war, are loaded and ready to follow. But concerns remain. On July 23rd—only one day after António Guterres, the UN’s secretary-general, and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had brokered the deal to allow the resumption of Ukrainian grain exports—Russia in Odessa. Days later a Russian missile killed Oleksiy Vadaturskyi, the head of one of Ukraine’s biggest grain exporters, and his wife, in Mykolaiv, another port city. An adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, said Vadaturskyi had been deliberately targeted.