Vasyl Bodnar, Ukraine’s envoy to Ankara, said on Sunday that the Russian-flagged Zhibek Zholy was unable to enter the port of Karasu on Turkey’s northern Black Sea coast. “We have full cooperation with the Turkish side,” he told Ukrainian television. “The ship was arrested at the entrance to the port.” Bodnar said Turkish authorities would decide on Monday how to deal with the vessel, which is the first cargo ship to be loaded at the port of Berdyansk on Ukraine’s Azov Sea coast since it was seized by Russian forces this year. “The fate of the ship will be known tomorrow,” he said. The Zhibek Zholy is the first known cargo ship to depart one of the recently seized ports for a destination outside of Russia. Local Russian authorities announced his departure to signal the reopening of the commercial port. A senior Ukrainian government official in Kyiv confirmed the Turkish move, saying the arrest was “part of international cooperation in criminal matters”. Russia’s Tass news agency reported that the ship was denied entry to Karasu. Turkey’s foreign, trade and transport ministries did not respond to requests for comment. Ukraine’s attorney general asked Ankara last week to stop the ship, whose departure from Berdyansk was described by Bodnar as an attempt to “violate the territorial integrity of Ukraine.” Ukraine has accused Moscow of stealing grain from land seized by Russian forces and using occupied ports to ship it out of the country to sell on international markets. Turkish authorities, which control the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits that connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, have previously appeared reluctant to take action against ships that Ukraine said were carrying stolen grain, even as some of the ships docked at Turkish ports and sold their shipments to Turkish buyers. Ankara has previously argued that since some ships use falsified documents to indicate they were loaded in Russia rather than occupied Ukrainian territory, it is technically difficult to determine the true origin of their cargo. Zhibek Zholy’s last known port of call was Novorossiysk, a Russian port on the northeastern Black Sea coast. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has performed a difficult balancing act since the outbreak of conflict between Turkey’s Black Sea neighbors. While his country is a NATO member that has supplied Kyiv with armed drones and restricted Russian military access to its waters and airspace, the Turkish president has also sought to avoid the wrath of Moscow, which is a major partner in energy, trade and tourism. as in the conflicts in Syria and Libya. Turkey, however, has been engaged in intense diplomacy with the UN in a bid to create a grain corridor to ensure the safe passage of some 20 million tonnes of wheat trapped in Ukraine that must be exported before the summer harvest. Officials in Kyiv have warned that if Russia does not end its blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, the country’s grain exports – nearly 15 percent of the global total – could be at risk, raising the threat of global food shortages .

Last week, Ukraine’s trade envoy and deputy economy minister told the Financial Times that Russia was using the blockade to impose dominance on global commodity markets. Kyiv has said it cannot accept Moscow’s terms for ending the blockade, which include giving the Russian navy the right to inspect ships entering and leaving Ukrainian ports. On Thursday, Russian forces withdrew from Snake Island, a strategic outpost near Black Sea shipping lanes, after heavy shelling from Ukraine. The move has raised hopes that the blockade will be broken soon. Russia described its withdrawal from Snake Island as a “gesture of goodwill” but launched deadly missile strikes on a town near the port of Odessa the next day, killing 21 people.