As if Ukraine’s battered economy and political conflicts with Russia weren’t dismaying enough, a logjam on the country’s Soviet-era rail network is preventing some farmers from shipping bumper harvests in the breadbasket of Eastern Europe.
A record supply of crops, from wheat to corn to sunflowers, is overwhelming the capacity of a money-losing rail monopoly that hasn’t added a new freight locomotive in almost five decades and can’t keep up with the pace of repairs on battered and broken grain wagons. Longer waits to secure transport are disrupting deliveries in a country that is one of the world’s biggest shippers of grain.
