Ukraine launched a massive overnight drone-and-missile strike on Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiysk on Wednesday, knocking out two of Russia's biggest grain terminals, hitting a naval base and killing at least two people, including an 8-year-old child, Russian officials and industry sources said.

The assault, one of the deepest Ukrainian blows against the export infrastructure that funds Moscow's war, followed by hours President Volodymyr Zelensky's disclosure that Kyiv had handed U.S. negotiators new proposals to end the four-and-a-half-year conflict, and preceded a threat from Russian President Vladimir Putin to seize European commercial vessels if Brussels sold cargo taken from ships tied to Russia's oil trade.

The port strike

The Novorossiysk grain terminal, with an export capacity of 8.5 million metric tons a year, halted operations, industry sources told Reuters. Three other sources said NKHP, a second terminal with 7.1 million tons of capacity, was also damaged and shut. Demetra Holding, which owns the first terminal, said only that it had sustained unspecified damage. OZK, NKHP's principal owner, said no one had been hurt. Russia is the world's largest wheat exporter, and its main grain lobby warned last month that Ukrainian drone attacks could shut down Black Sea grain shipments, pushing up prices and causing hunger in Africa and the Middle East. Zelensky said on Telegram that the strike also targeted Russia's Novorossiysk naval base with drones, missiles and unmanned boats.

On the ground

Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev described a "massive" wave of Ukrainian attacks that killed at least two people, including an 8-year-old child, and injured eight. Novorossiysk Mayor Andrei Kravchenko said four unspecified enterprises and more than two dozen residential buildings had been damaged, and the local Autonomous Thermal Energy Company said a severed water main cut supplies to the city of 260,000. In Russian-annexed Crimea, Sevastopol's Russian-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said more than three dozen drones were shot down over the peninsula. Novorossiysk also hosts oil-export infrastructure for the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, part-owned by Chevron and Exxon Mobil; the Financial Times reported Wednesday that Ukraine has paused strikes on CPC tankers at U.S. Vice President JD Vance's request, and there was no indication the pipeline was hit overnight.

A plan to Washington

Zelensky said in his Tuesday nightly address that Kyiv had handed Washington a plan to end the war. "We have conveyed our proposals to the American side," he said, adding that the United States could help strengthen Ukraine's air defenses while pressing Moscow to prepare "for an end to the war rather than prolonging it." U.S. negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were last in Moscow in January and have not yet visited Kyiv, Al Jazeera reported. Talks have largely stalled since the U.S. and Israel opened their war with Iran.

Putin's warning

Putin, speaking Wednesday aboard the guided-missile cruiser Varyag off the Pacific island of Sakhalin, warned that Moscow would seize European commercial vessels if the EU carried out plans to sell cargo from ships tied to Russia's oil trade. "If these plans are put into practice, we will have to respond in kind," Putin said, according to RIA Novosti, calling the European moves "piracy and robbery." He said orders had already gone to the Defense Ministry and the Pacific Fleet. EU sanctions adopted last month permit member states to sell oil and other cargo seized from vessels in Moscow's "shadow fleet."

The Kremlin's side

The Kremlin had not issued a direct statement on the Novorossiysk strike by press time; Russian reaction reaches this account through Al Jazeera's and The Moscow Times' paraphrase of Putin's Sakhalin remarks. Moscow's public position remains that any settlement requires Ukraine to cede four regions Russia claims to have annexed, along with resolving what it calls the conflict's root causes. Russian officials have previously denied that further mobilization is needed.

What comes next

Zelensky said Russia will use next month's parliamentary vote as cover to call up "several hundred thousand Russians by the end of the year," with more to follow in 2027.