Black Sea warfare deadliest for shipping, threatens global grain supplies

In the ancient waters of the Black Sea, where civilizations have traded grain for millennia, a modern war has transformed commerce into catastrophe. July 2026 brought more death to merchant sailors in a single month than the entire preceding conflict had claimed, as Russian and Ukrainian forces struck each other's ships and ports with mounting ferocity. The disruption has reduced grain exports to less than half their normal flow, and the hunger that follows war does not stay within borders — it travels along the same routes the grain once did, arriving first at the tables of the world's most v