How Russia Profits From Ukraine Invasion by Selling Stolen Grain on a Global Black Market
Moscow’s war ‘is feeding itself’ as friends and backers cash in on crops from occupied territories
5 min
KYIV, Ukraine—Beyond the bombs and gunfire of Russia’s war in Ukraine , a parallel economic war is raging.
Its front line is on occupied Ukrainian farmlands, from which Russia and its partners have sold almost $1 billion in stolen grain on a burgeoning black market.
Moscow’s forces in Ukraine since 2022 have occupied some of Europe’s most fertile farmland. The occupiers have either seized harvests or bought them cheaply, often forcibly.
The business involves a wide network of clients who benefit from Moscow’s wartime patronage system, including a Russian shipyard equipping the invasion, a company affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and a Crimean businessman who trades with Syria and Israel. Another company sells through the United Arab Emirates.
Trading the looted Ukrainian agricultural products keeps Russia’s allies funded and loyal to Moscow even as it faces mounting economic pressure , offering a sort of off-balance-sheet vehicle financing Kremlin objectives.
The Kremlin didn’t return requests for comment on its exports of Ukrainian crops.
“It’s like the war is feeding itself,” said Pascal Turlan, legal director at rights organization Project Expedite Justice, which is helping Ukrainian prosecutors investigate grain theft. “The illicit trade brings revenue to a Kremlin-sponsored patronage system, which in turn helps the conflict and the occupation to continue.”
The exact commercial value of Russia’s pilferage is difficult to determine amid the war’s chaos and Moscow’s subterfuge, but it is large. Since 2022, the operation has directly shipped at least 4 million tons of grain and other produce from occupied Ukraine to international markets, generating revenue of $800 million, said Markiyan Dmytrasevych, Ukraine’s deputy agriculture minister.
Much more has been exported by land or small ships, according to Ukrainian nonprofit organization Texty, which estimates the total value of grain taken by Russia in occupied territories could be as high as $6.4 billion.
The patronage take many forms. Three bulk vessels that export large volumes of illicit grain are owned through a chain of corporate entities by Russia’s state-run United Shipbuilding Corp., which also produced warships used to shell Ukrainian cities, according to the U.S. government.
A Russian company that exclusively sold grain from the occupied region of Zaporizhzhia donated 10 million rubles, or $111,000, to a battalion fighting in the province, according to a document obtained by KibOrg News, a Ukrainian project that documents Russian economic-looting activities in the occupied territories.
Moscow is also attacking Ukraine’s own grain exports. Late Wednesday, a Russian missile struck at a ship that was carrying Ukrainian wheat just after it had left a Black Sea port for Egypt, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky said on his Telegram channel.
From farm to sea
Russia’s illicit agricultural trade begins on Ukrainian farms. Moscow’s forces either compel farmers to sell their crops at below-market prices or steal them, sometimes at gunpoint.
Bohdan Katerenyak, the manager of a silo in Kherson, a southern Ukrainian province conquered by Russia at the beginning of the war, said he was at work in August 2022 when men with machine guns, clad in balaclavas, entered his office.
“We have an order to take over,” one told him in a Chechen accent, handing him an identification card from the FSB, Russia’s domestic security service, Katerenyak said. A few days later, another man, also claiming to be an FSB agent, arrived and impounded the facility’s grain.
“They are bandits,” Katerenyak said of the men. Fearful, he fled to Ukrainian-controlled territory and later learned the silos had been emptied.
From farms like Katerenyak’s, produce is shipped by truck and rail to ports along the Black Sea, some on occupied Ukrainian territory.
Russian authorities say that in the first half of this year they sent 15 ships carrying 81,000 tons of wheat to Turkey from Mariupol, another city conquered during the war.
Turkey bans ships from occupied Ukrainian terminals and cooperates with Kyiv to block illicit trade, the country’s foreign-affairs officials said.
Separately, Ukrainian prosecutor Ihor Ponochovniy in June started tracking a Turkish-owned ship, the Usko MFU, which he suspected had carried stolen grain last year from the Crimean port of Sevastopol . Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and in 2022 linked it with occupied Kherson.
Ukraine’s border force in June told Ponochovniy the Usko MFU had entered Ukrainian waters. He issued a search warrant and police boarded it. Onboard they found records showing it had left Sevastopol last November for Turkey carrying 2,100 tons of crushed sunflower seeds and brown wheat potentially worth half a million dollars.
Investigators said they found onboard a message from the ship’s managers to the captain instructing him to conceal the cargo’s Crimean origin. Ukraine’s border force in July seized the Usko MFU.
The ship’s owner, USKO Shipping Management, didn’t respond to a request for comment. A lawyer representing the vessel’s captain declined to comment.
Mikhail Ganaga, a former professional wrestler and the son of a district governor in Crimea, is among a select group of collaborators who have profited from the grain theft.
Ganaga controls Agro-Fregat LLC, which delivers grain harvested in occupied territories and has shipped grain to Israel and two of its foes, Syria and Iran, according to trade and shipping records and Ganaga himself. Ganaga and Agro-Fregat didn’t return requests for comment.
Pressure to halt shipments
Ukraine is applying diplomatic pressure on importing countries, with some success. In the past two years, Egypt, Israel and Lebanon either canceled loadings or stopped buying grain cargoes after Ukrainian diplomats told them they had departed from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine , according to Ukrainian officials.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhiy Tykhiy said that Lebanon shifted to Ukrainian grain. Egypt has refused some grain shipments that originated in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.
Russian allies Iran and Syria have said they won’t abide by sanctions. Iran has supplied the Kremlin deadly weaponry that enhanced Russia’s ability to hit military and civilian targets. This month, Tehran started to supply ballistic missiles to the Kremlin. Iranian politicians said they were in exchange for Russian grain.
Tehran buys barley in Crimea for $140 a ton, a 34% discount from market prices, said Kateryna Yaresko, an analyst at SeaKrime, a nonprofit project in Kyiv that tracks illegal shipments from Crimea and provides information to the Ukrainian authorities.
Traders in Russian-occupied territories are building ties with Tehran’s hard-line circles. Igor Rudetsky, a manager at a grain terminal in occupied Crimea, last year posted on his social-media accounts pictures of himself meeting representatives of Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, which is sanctioned by the U.S. for shipping weapons on behalf of Iran’s military and nuclear technologies.
Rudetsky, according to his posts, also visited Pars Holding, an agricultural company that is part of a foundation controlled by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei . Rudetsky said by text message that he spoke to the companies as part of an international marketing campaign that also included China, India and Africa, though he says he doesn’t sell produce himself.
Rudetsky said grain exports from Russia aren’t restricted by international sanctions and that he bought the port “for real money” in a deal that was “legally impeccable.”
Russia deems Crimea its territory but other countries don’t and consider any exports from it illegal.
Yemen is a new market for Crimean exports. In June, a Russian state-controlled vessel, the Zafar, delivered grains to al-Salif, a port held by the Iranian-backed Houthi faction in Yemen, according to shipping and corporate records.
As Kyiv cracks down, exporters are adopting increasingly complex evasion tactics such as transferring grain to Russia and mixing it with legitimate products before reselling it on international markets. Ukrainian authorities are struggling to keep up.
“We need more people,” said Ponochovniy, the prosecutor.
Ukrainian prosecutors in Kharkiv are probing a trader that it suspects stole grain and resold cargoes to an Emirati company. Helios Plus drew prosecutors’ attention after it removed all 700 tons of grain left at a bread factory flour mill in the nearby town of Kupyansk when Russia seized it in August 2022.
Helios Plus didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The company in 2015 started selling grain out of areas of eastern Ukraine that had come under control of Russian-backed separatists, according to Russian records viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The records were obtained in an investigation by Project Expedite Justice.
The documents indicate Helios Plus took a large volume of grain from other occupied territories in the past two years. It then sold the grain to buyers in Turkey, the U.A.E. and as far as Costa Rica, according to customs declarations.
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3 min
Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.
The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.
Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.
Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.
Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.
These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.
Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.
Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.
Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.
“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.
“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.
Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.
“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.
That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.
“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.
They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.
An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.
What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.
One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.
But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.
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