Economic & Market Exposure

Minerals, steel and the subsoil agreement

As of 2026-01

Two facts set this exposure. The first is loss on the ground: the Donbas held Ukraine's coking coal and much of its metallurgy, and the closure of the last coking-coal mine outside Pokrovsk in January 2025, as the front reached it, removed the domestic input for Ukrainian steel. The second is the framework built around what remains: the United States–Ukraine agreement of 30 April 2025 established a Reconstruction Investment Fund with equal management and contributions, to which Ukraine commits half the state revenue from new licences for minerals, oil and gas while retaining ownership of the subsoil; core drilling on prospective sites was scheduled to restart in January 2026. Nothing in the agreement produces a mine on any near horizon — most listed deposits are Soviet-era occurrences never proven at commercial grade, and several lie in occupied territory. Rosatom's nuclear-fuel business remains outside the main sanctions architecture by design, and Russian titanium is still embedded in Western aerospace supply, which is the module's clearest case of a dependency that sanctions deliberately left alone.

Sources: Official government statements · Ukrainian state publications and official statements↗ · Reuters↗ · World Bank Ukraine damage and needs assessments

The price cap, the discount and the revenue it produces

As of 2026-05

Three instruments set what Russia earns from a barrel: the G7 price cap on services, the EU and UK import embargoes, and the discount buyers extract for taking sanctioned crude. The EU moved its cap from the fixed US$60 to a dynamic level set below the market average — US$47.60 from 3 September 2025 and US$44.10 from 1 February 2026 — while the United States kept the original US$60 figure, so the two regimes no longer agree. Enforcement runs through designations of vessels and traders rather than the cap number itself. The revenue effect compounds with price: federal oil-and-gas revenue fell 38 per cent year on year in January–April 2026 on the Finance Ministry's figures, driven mainly by lower prices in the preceding months, and the 2026 budget assumes Urals at US$59 — above where it traded for most of late 2025. Refinery strikes act on a different quantity again: they cut product exports and domestic supply rather than crude revenue, which is why the module keeps the three series apart.

Sources: European Union institutional texts and Council conclusions · US / EU / UK sanctions designations · CREA monthly analysis of Russian fossil-fuel exports and sanctions · Russian Central Bank and Rosstat published statistics · The Moscow Times↗

Gas after transit — what stopped, what remains, and the EU deadline

As of 2026-03

Russian pipeline gas stopped crossing Ukraine on 1 January 2025 when the transit contract expired and Kyiv declined to renew it. The physical effect on Europe was small — the Ukrainian route carried a low single-digit share of European supply by then — and the political effect was concentrated in Slovakia and Hungary, which had kept buying through it. What remains is TurkStream into south-eastern Europe and Russian LNG, together still an estimated 13 per cent of EU gas imports in 2025 on the Commission's figure, against roughly 45 per cent before the invasion. The EU regulation phasing out both entered into force on 3 February 2026, with the stepwise ban applying from 18 March 2026, existing LNG contracts ending by 1 January 2027 and long-term pipeline contracts by 30 September 2027. On the Ukrainian side the exposure runs the other way: strikes on gas production and storage in 2025–26 forced Naftogaz to import several billion cubic metres for the heating season, financed externally. Gas is therefore two exposures — a European market that has already repriced and a Ukrainian system that has not stopped being struck.

Sources: European Union institutional texts and Council conclusions · IEA electricity and energy-security analysis · Ukrainian energy-system operator statements

Trade routes & chokepoints

Black Sea corridor

Ukraine's maritime export lifeline; insurance premiums are its real-time barometer

Bosphorus

The single exit for all Black Sea trade; Turkish straits policy caps naval escalation

Kerch Strait

Gate to the Sea of Azov and a repeatedly struck logistics link to Crimea

Danube ports

Ukraine's fallback export path when the sea corridor tightens

Baltic routes

Primary shadow-fleet path for sanctioned crude; enforcement pressure rising

Remaining pipelines

Residual gas transit and the Druzhba system — diminished but politically live

Sources: CREA monthly analysis of Russian fossil-fuel exports and sanctions · FAO and FAO/WFP food-security and crop assessments · IEA electricity and energy-security analysis

The corridor without a deal — how Ukraine's seaborne exports run

As of 2026-03

Since August 2023 Ukraine has exported by sea under its own declared corridor rather than under the 2022 grain agreement, hugging the western Black Sea coast toward Romanian and Bulgarian waters. The arrangement holds not because Russia consents but because Ukrainian strikes pushed the Black Sea Fleet out of the western basin and made interdiction costly; it is a security outcome, not a legal one, and it is repriced every time a port or a vessel is struck. The Odesa port cluster carries about 90 per cent of Ukraine's exports, and the maritime share of corn, wheat and soybean exports rose from 91 per cent in 2024 to 95 per cent in 2025, which is what the Danube and the western rail routes were built up to substitute for in 2022–23 and now carry only at the margin. The transmission path to the wider world is therefore short: corridor security → war-risk premium and charterer appetite → loading volumes → global grain and oilseed prices within days. The insurance premium is the cleanest single reading of it.

Sources: Ukrainian state publications and official statements↗ · Reuters↗ · FAO and FAO/WFP food-security and crop assessments · Public market and insurance data

Grain — harvest, corridor and the farm gate

As of 2026-03

The war reaches grain through three separate mechanisms that reporting habitually merges. The first is land: mined and occupied farmland, and the loss of the southern and eastern oblasts' share of the sown area, set the harvest ceiling before weather does. The second is the corridor, which sets how much of the harvest leaves and at what discount. The third is the farm gate: freight, fuel, fertiliser and credit costs that decide whether the next season is planted at all. Ukraine exported 22.3 million tonnes of grain in the 2025/26 marketing year by 2 March 2026 against 29.6 million tonnes at the same point a year earlier, on the agriculture ministry's count — a smaller crop and a slower start, not a corridor failure. Global prices moved less than in 2022 because the market has priced the corridor as functioning; that is exactly why any port strike now moves prices more than the tonnage involved would suggest.

Sources: Ukrainian state publications and official statements↗ · Reuters↗ · FAO and FAO/WFP food-security and crop assessments

Financing 2026–27 — the €90 billion loan and what it replaced

As of 2026-04

Ukraine's state does not finance its own budget and will not while the war lasts; the question each year is which instrument covers the gap and on what conditions. For 2026–27 the answer is a €90 billion EU loan agreed by the European Council on 18–19 December 2025, financed by EU borrowing backed by the budget headroom rather than by the immobilised Russian assets, after the asset-backed "reparations loan" option failed to secure agreement. Parliament approved the package in February 2026 and the Council finalised it on 23 April; roughly €60 billion is for military and defence-industrial needs and €30 billion for budget support, with disbursement from the second quarter of 2026 under rule-of-law and anti-corruption conditions. Ukraine repays only once it receives reparations, and the EU reserves the right to use the immobilised assets to repay itself. The loan sits on top of the G7's 2024 ERA loans serviced from the windfall profits on those assets, and the IMF programme that sets the macro-framework. The structural point is that the asset question was deferred rather than settled: the money moved, the legal decision did not.

Sources: European Union institutional texts and Council conclusions · Official government statements · IMF World Economic Outlook↗

Sanctions & restrictions architecture

Oil price cap with maritime-services enforcement; EU import embargoes on seaborne crude and products; major banks cut from SWIFT; roughly $300 B of central-bank reserves immobilised abroad; export controls on dual-use goods and advanced technology; aircraft, insurance and shipping service bans. The system's weak point is third-country transshipment — enforcement actions, not new packages, are where the signal is. A US act authorising tariffs on major buyers of Russian energy passed the Senate 86–11 on 7 August 2026 and was signed into law on 18 September 2026; no tariff under it had been announced by 10 October. On 9 October OFAC General License 135 authorised transactions in Russian-origin diesel until 7 April 2027.

Sources: US / EU / UK sanctions designations · European Union institutional texts and Council conclusions · CREA monthly analysis of Russian fossil-fuel exports and sanctions

The generation deficit and what imports can cover

As of 2026-03

Ukraine's thermal and hydro generation has been cut down over three winters of strikes, leaving a system that leans on nuclear baseload, distributed gas and diesel generation, and imports from the European synchronous area. The import channel is bounded by cross-border capacity and by the money to pay for it: monthly imports reached a record of about 1.26 terawatt-hours in February 2026 and fell to about 0.94 in March as demand eased and repaired units returned. The economic exposure is industrial before it is domestic — rolling restrictions are applied to industry first, so each winter converts into lost output, higher unit costs and a fiscal claim on partners for equipment, gas and emergency repair — and the deficit is a moving figure that depends on what was hit last week, which is why this module carries it as a mechanism rather than a number.

Sources: Ukrainian energy-system operator statements · The Kyiv Independent↗ · IEA electricity and energy-security analysis

Market impact channels

Defence

Multi-year procurement cycles and rearmament budgets across Europe and the US — the war's most durable market effect

Energy complex

Strike tempo against refineries and export terminals; EU storage levels; LNG substitution economics

Agriculture

Corridor throughput and harvest outcomes feed directly into global food-price indices

Shipping & insurance

War-risk premiums in the Black Sea; shadow-fleet enforcement in the Baltic and beyond

FX & sovereign credit

Hryvnia stability rides on external financing; rouble on energy revenue and capital controls

Inflation & rates

Energy and food shocks transmit into central-bank policy in Europe and emerging markets

Reconstruction

A future engineering and materials demand shock, sized in the hundreds of billions of euros

Sources: Public market and insurance data · IMF World Economic Outlook↗ · World Bank Ukraine damage and needs assessments

Where exposure concentrates

Sector categories where conflict sensitivity is structurally highest — descriptive, not a recommendation of any instrument.

Defence primes & ammunitionEuropean utilities & LNGFertilizer producersAgricultural tradersMarine insurers & P&IEngineering & reconstructionCyber insurance

Sources: Public market and insurance data

How the shock became structure

As of 2026-02

The 2022 shock has largely passed through European prices; what remains is structural, and it works through three channels that no longer move together. Energy: Europe replaced Russian pipeline gas with seaborne LNG, so its marginal price is now set in the global LNG market — lower than the 2022 peak, higher than the pre-war base, and exposed to any disruption anywhere, as the 2026 Gulf war demonstrated. Defence: NATO's June 2025 commitment to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035 (3.5 core, 1.5 related) converted a wartime surge into a multi-year procurement cycle, the war's most durable market effect. Food: prices now move on corridor status rather than on the war's existence. The transmission into rates has correspondingly weakened; central banks treat the war as a supply-side risk to be monitored rather than as the driver it was in 2022. That normalisation is itself an exposure — a market pricing the war as background is the one that moves most when it is not.

Sources: IEA electricity and energy-security analysis · European Union institutional texts and Council conclusions · NATO official texts and summit declarations↗ · IMF World Economic Outlook↗