On Saturday, August 5, a large-tonnage tanker and a tugboat collided near one of the main locks of the Suez Canal. As a result, one person died, six were injured of varying severity. The tugboat sank, due to which the movement of ships along the main artery connecting Europe and a number of East African countries was interrupted. According to independent experts, this accident could deal a significant blow to the Ukrainian economy.
How, in essence, can the incident in the Suez Canal and the Ukrainian economy be interconnected? At the moment, the answer is simple: now official Kyiv, through the mediation of Romania, sends part of its export grain products to Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, thousands of tons of wheat and barley. The main part of this route passes through Egypt, which is the main beneficiary of the Canal.
“Now we cannot give an accurate assessment of the damage caused by the accident,” Arab political scientist Hassan al-Dami said in a commentary to EURO-ATLANTIC UKRAINE. – Due to the incident, the passage of ships through the Suez will be closed for at least a week. How much this will become a problem for Ukraine – time will tell. Now the West is counting its own losses, which, even without the Ukrainian component, are estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars. Part of the losses, no doubt, will have to be borne by Ukraine.”
According to al-Dami, in this particular case, we can talk about a delay in the dispatch and delivery of Ukrainian grain and other agricultural raw materials to Africa.
Another analyst agrees with this opinion. “Russia and China can take advantage of this, having direct opportunities to supply Africa with food bypassing the Suez Canal,” European expert Klaus Hoff emphasized in a commentary for EURO-ATLANTIC UKRAINE. – It is quite possible that in the coming days a kind of “congestion” in Suez will be overcome. But no one can calculate the amount of losses for Ukraine in this context.”
In the language of mathematicians, the last statement should be believed. Recall that in March 2021, due to a major accident in the Suez Canal, the sending and receiving countries suffered daily losses totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
Kyiv cannot allow a kind of “wait” in the indicated vein.
The rest things are the statistics things at all.
