Two cargo ships left a port near Odessa, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said today — the third and fourth to depart from Ukrainian Black Sea ports after Russia pulled out of an agreement on safe passage for ships carrying grain.

Oleksandr Kubrakov said the ships Anna-Theresa (Liberian-flagged) and Ocean Courtesy (Marshall Islands-flagged) departed the port of Pivdeni through a temporary corridor for civilian ships.

Russia blockaded Ukrainian ports after invading the neighboring country in February 2022 and threatened to treat all ships as potential military targets after it pulled out of a UN-backed Ukrainian grain deal in July.

In response, Ukraine announced the creation of a “humanitarian corridor” that ‘hugs’ the western shores of the Black Sea near Romania and Bulgaria. Two ships blocked in Ukrainian ports during the invasion were thus able to depart.

Kubrakov’s ministry, which is responsible for Ukraine’s infrastructure, said in a Facebook post that Anna-Theresa had been in port since February 22, 2022, and Ocean Courtesy since February 16 of the same year.

According to the LSEG interactive map, the two ships were more than 10 kilometers offshore today, with their engines running and heading southeast.

Anna-Theresa and Ocean Courtesy are carrying 56,000 metric tons of pig iron and 172,000 tons of concentrate iron ore, respectively, Kubrakov wrote on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Ukrainian MP Oleksii Ontsarenko, who is from Odesa, posted today on the Telegram app that two ships were seen near the city. He posted a photo showing two distant ships. Reuters is currently unable to verify the date or location of the photograph.

The grain deal allowed Ukraine, a major agricultural exporter, to shift tens of millions of tons of production to other countries.