Grain Trail: Tracking Russia’s Ghost Ships with Satellite Imagery

The main grain terminal at the Port of Sevastopol in occupied Crimea has fallen quiet in recent years – at least according to ship monitoring services.

Automated Identification Systems (AIS) tracking data, which provides open source information on the positioning and movement of ships, shows few ships visiting the Avlita grain terminal in Sevastopol since Russia annexed the territory from Ukraine in 2015. 

International sanctions on the city of Sevastopol and the Avlita terminal (which has also been referred to as Aval in some media reports and registers) could explain why traffic has seemingly been so low. 

But other open sources paint a radically different picture of events at the terminal.

Satellite imaging services such as Planet, social media posts and a new Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) tool built as part of Bellingcat’s Tech Fellowship scheme, show that vessels have in fact covertly continued to make regular visits.

Bellingcat identified at least 179 days in the first 12 months of Russia’s full-scale invasion where ships had been present at Avlita terminal with their AIS transponders turned off. 

This appears to support the findings of several media reports that claimed activity at the terminal has continued apace.

The Financial Times, Bloomberg, CNN, Reuters, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal and Associated Press have all reported on apparent grain exports at the terminal since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, even highlighting some of the ships involved. Some even point to evidence the terminal has been used as an exit point for grain taken by Russia from areas of occupied Ukraine, something Ukrainian ministers have claimed is “outright robbery” but which Russia denies.

Yet despite this coverage, many details about operations at the terminal remain unknown or are undocumented.

For example, the SeaKrime monitoring project of Ukrainian activist group Mytrovorets has published a list of ships it says have visited the Avlita Terminal to export stolen grain. However, only a handful of vessels on this list are documented with accompanying imagery. And while media reports have raised the issue, most have focussed on individual ships or incidents rather than providing a full account of the scale of the operation.

Bellingcat can now add further details about the frequency of ship visits to the Avlita terminal over the first year of Russia’s invasion, as well as help identify more dates when ships were present there. 

Satellite imagery service Planet provided Bellingcat with access to imagery that allowed us to identify every single day that its satellites captured a ship at the Avlita terminal in the first 12 months of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

In total, there are 148 days that ships appear to have been present at the terminal, based on Planet imagery alone. With the permission of Planet, Bellingcat is publishing each of these images. They can be seen in the interactive above and are individually linked at the bottom of this story.

Bellingcat has also been able to identify a further 31 days when ships were present at the terminal thanks to a Ship Detection Tool (SDT) that utilises synthetic aperture radar captured by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite to provide extra coverage whe