'The war came to us': the Danube ports in the firing line

With Odesa out of action, Izmail and Reni are now the only places vital grain and sunflower oil can be exported

- Emma Graham-Harrison

It had been hundreds of years since the world paid much attention to the Danube river port of Izmail at the edge of the estuary that now separates Romania and Ukraine. The Russian and Ottoman empires traded blows here in the 18th century, and one epic battle in 1790 was so central to Moscow's concept of its military power that it was glorified in the country's first unofficial national anthem. Then the area slipped back into obscurity, traded back and forth between competing powers, a smuggler's paradise of sprawling wetlands and loosely policed borders.

Until, that is, Vladimir Putin launched a new imperial war and tried to close the Black Sea to Ukrainian shipping. The rusting Soviet-era docks and silted-up shipping channels in Izmail and neighbouring Reni became globally important overnight.

Ukraine produces about 10% of the world's wheat, feeding hundreds of millions of people. These Danube ports, in a historical cultural melting pot known as Bessarabia, are currently the only place its vast harvest can be reliably loaded on to ships for export.

That has revived the dying local economy but also put it in the sights of Moscow's generals, with both ports being hit repeatedly this summer.

"After the first strike people were shocked. The war had come to us too," said Reni's mayor, Ihor Plekhov. "We needed to prepare shelters."