“The vessel is waiting. The berth is waiting. Demurrage is rising every day”: Nearly 60 vessels queue near Sulina for Ukrainian ports

Around 50–60 vessels have gathered near the Sulina Canal in Romanian territorial waters, waiting to transit to Ukrainian Danube ports. Some vessels have been in the queue for more than a week, Kateryna Kononenko, operations manager at Avalon, told Latifundist.com.

The queue began growing rapidly after Ukraine’s deep-sea ports suspended operations. Charterers initially waited for operations there to resume, but later began diverting vessels to the Danube.

According to Kononenko, the queue could be managed when up to 20 vessels were waiting near Sulina. Once that threshold was exceeded, the situation turned into a bottleneck.

“There are already more than 50, practically close to 60. They have gathered in Romanian territorial waters, less than 12 miles from the coast, and are waiting to transit the Sulina Canal to Ukrainian ports. Many vessels have been waiting for a week, and some even longer,” she said.

A shortage of Romanian pilots is one of the main constraints. Only Romanian pilots can navigate vessels through the Sulina Canal, while Ukrainian pilots cannot work on this section.

Only one commission is currently processing vessels in Sulina. It includes border guards, a sanitary doctor and representatives of other services. Processing a vessel takes at least one hour and, in some cases, up to two hours.

The situation is further complicated by priority clearance for certain categories of vessels. In particular, vessels carrying live animals are allowed to pass outside the general queue.

According to Kononenko, shipping agents also do not have access to the Sulina transit lists and do not know until the last moment which vessels will be assigned a pilot. Information is exchanged through Ukraine’s Sea Ports Authority, Romania’s Lower Danube River Administration in Galati and the Sulina office, but agents have no way to control the process.

The prolonged waiting is already significantly increasing logistics costs. For a vessel with a deadweight of around 6,000 tons, demurrage is currently $6,000–$7,000 per day, compared with around $4,000 previously.

“The vessel is waiting. The berth is waiting. Demurrage is rising every day. And then all these costs are factored into the logistics cost,” Kononenko explained.

She said the current situation resembles 2022, when the Danube also faced a sharp increase in cargo flows and a shortage of pilots. Despite this, the mechanism for coordination between the responsible administrations has still not been properly established four years later.