First container ship has left port in Ukraine since the start of the war

Ukraine already announced last week the establishment of a "humanitarian corridor" in the Black Sea, which would make it possible to leave Ukrainian ports for the many merchant ships that have been locked up since the start of the war on February 24.

On Wednesday morning, the Hong Kong-flagged container ship Joseph Schulte became, according to Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov, the first to take advantage of the opportunity to finally get away.

It was loaded with 2,114 containers and headed for the Bosporus Strait, writes the Deputy Prime Minister in a post on Facebook.

"The corridor will primarily be used to evacuate ships that were in Ukrainian ports (Chornomorsk, Odesa and Pivdennyi) when Russia started its invasion," writes Kubrakov further in the post.

According to Reuters, Russia has not commented on Ukraine's opening of the corridor in the Black Sea and thus not whether the country will respect the move.

But the Schulte ship's departure from Odesa on Wednesday, according to military analyst Anders Puck Nielsen of the Norwegian Defense Academy, can best be seen as a defeat from Russia's side.

He points out that Russia may have shot itself in the foot when it withdrew from the UN-established grain agreement in July

"This will be a dilemma for Russia, which has gone from having reasonable control over who sails in and out of Ukraine under the grain agreement, to not being able to control anything at all," says Anders Puck Nielsen.