Ukraine today announced the departure of a merchant ship from the port of Odesa, defying Russia, which has threatened to sink such vessels after it pulled out of a deal allowing Ukrainian grain exports.

“Ukraine has taken an important step towards the restoration of freedom of navigation in the Black Sea,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote tonight on the X platform (formerly Twitter) welcoming the event. He also confirmed that the cargo ship Joseph Schulte had left Ukrainian waters and was heading towards the Bosphorus.

The ship crossed the Ukrainian part of the Black Sea on Wednesday afternoon, several hours after leaving the southern port of Odessa. He had remained there tied up for more than a year and a half, since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

At 16:00 local time (17:00 Greek time) it was heading for the Turkish port of Ambarli in the Sea of ​​Marmara, according to a maritime traffic monitoring website.

The announcement of the Black Sea exit of the Hong Kong-flagged “Joseph Schulte” came despite new Russian nighttime shelling of Ukrainian grain depots on the Danube in the Odesa region.

“The container ship Joseph Schulte has left the port of Odessa and is sailing along the temporary corridor designated for commercial ships,” Oleksandr Kubrakov, Ukraine’s infrastructure minister, announced earlier today.

Ukraine had announced last week that it would open “temporary” lanes in the Black Sea despite threats from Russia, which this weekend fired warning shots at a truck bound for the Danube port of Izmail in southern Ukraine.

The river has become one of the main routes for the transport of Ukrainian agricultural products since July, when Moscow pulled out of a deal to export grain through the Black Sea that provided revenue to Kiev.