| Ship calls | Deadweight tonnage | |
| 2024 | 2,705 | 79.9 million dwt |
| 2023 | 759 | 32.4 million dwt |
| 2022 | 1,028 | 38.2 million dwt |
Lloyd’s List, Feb. 2025. The ports are Odesa, Chornomorsk, and Yuzhni.
A cautious International Monetary Fund mid-year evaluation of Ukraine’s economic outlook balances risk and ‘resilience’ this June:
“Russia’s war continues to take a devastating social and economic toll on Ukraine. Nevertheless, macroeconomic stability has been preserved through skillful policymaking as well as substantial external support. The economy has remained resilient, but the war is weighing on the outlook, with growth tempered by labor market strains and damage to energy infrastructure. Risks to the outlook remain exceptionally high and contingency planning is key to enable appropriate policy action should risks materialize.”
The Fund’s bottom-line April projection was 2.0% GDP growth this year; the June outlook is a slightly brighter “2 to 3 percent.” This is by no means a boom, and a point below Poland’s 3.2%; but it’s also noticeably above the Fund’s 1.5% guess for Russia, the 1.3% and 1.4% for neighboring Hungary and Slovakia, and also the 1.8% for the United States.
Ukrainian-economy background on this, shifting from the Fund’s “macro” world of growth, employment rates, and fiscal balances to the “micro” world of defense factories, seaports, and farm exports.
Industry: Ukraine’s industrial economy is evolving rapidly, as the war helps create a high-tech military industry and to an extent diminishes the centrality of the large “oligarchy” iron, steel, and grain industries Ukraine inherited from the Soviet era. PPI’s Kyiv-based New Ukraine Project Director Tamar Jacoby explains:
“The 2022 invasion reinvigorated a domestic defense industry that had atrophied beyond recognition since Soviet times. Thousands of IT technicians and engineers dropped whatever they were doing in peacetime to join the defense sector or enlist in the army and provide technical support on the front line. Today, some 700 defense manufacturers employ more than 300,000 technicians and sustain scores of other companies making weapons components and dual-use products.”
These are mostly start-up businesses — state-owned firms accounted for 80% of defense production in 2022, and now less than 30% — and they produce quite a lot. Per Jacoby, since 2022, Ukraine has multiplied its artillery-shell production about 25-fold, and upped drone production from fewer than 2,500 drones to a likely 4.5 million this year. The economic effect is to enlarge Ukraine’s world of small tech-oriented manufacturing, and (relatively) shift GDP away from large state-owned heavy industry plants. On the military side, it has underwritten a stunning and continuing naval success: without a single capital ship of its own, Ukraine used home-designed drones to sink a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s 74 ships by the end of 2023 and has forced the rest to shelter out of range in the east ever since.
Farm Exports and Rural Economy: This naval victory in turn reopened Ukraine’s main Black Sea trade route by the end of 2023. The Lloyd’s List ship arrival figures, showing vessel calls quadrupling in 2024, mean both steady flows of consumer goods into Ukraine and export income for industrial and rural communities.
Early that year, we cited honey as a kind of bellwether. This is a traditional Ukrainian standard: UN Food and Agriculture Organization stats found prewar Ukraine the world’s fourth-largest honey producer, with 200,000 professional beekeepers plus another 200,000 part-timers and hobbyists, 2.3 million bee colonies, and about 70,000 tons of honey produced for sale annually. (For context, the U.S. last year had about 120,000 professional and part-time beekeepers. They managed 2.6 million colonies and produced 69,500 tons of honey.) By the end of 2024, Americans had bought a record 12,300 tons of Ukrainian honey. This year’s total will probably be a bit lower, but still above the pre-war averages:
| Quantity | Value | |
| 2025? | 8,500 tons? | $18.0 million? |
| 2024 | 12,300 tons | $24.9 million |
| 2023 | 4,100 tons | $10.9 million |
| 2022 | 4,400 tons | $14.4 million |
| 2021 | 6,000 tons | $12.8 million |
| 2020 | 11,100 tons | $19.0 million |
| 2010-2019 average | 7,300 tons | $17.2 million |
Estimates for 2025 based on January – July U.S. Census totals.
Back to Macro: The honey figures — and those for iron and sunflower oil are similar — illustrate some of the IMF’s “resilience” in practice. Export income is flowing to Ukraine’s beekeepers. The manufacturing, packaging, and transport services needed to collect honey and package it for sale abroad work, and financial systems likewise. And busy seaports are supporting large-scale commodity trade, with cargo flows doubling the levels of 2022 and 2023.
This doesn’t negate the high risks the IMF mentions, nor the Ukrainian government’s challenges in covering wartime budgets. But it does show Ukraine’s economy holding up well, from soldiers at the front to naval specialists keeping the Russian fleet in port, the creativity and rapid growth of drone-design labs and factories, to beekeepers and sunflower farmers on the land.
From PPI:
Kyiv-based Tamar Jacoby directs PPI’s New Ukraine Project, with in-depth research and regular reporting on Ukrainian daily life, the mood at the front, industrial evolution, anti-corruption programs, and more. Recent samples:
And our February Trade Fact on the Ukrainian cause, the Trump administration and Vladimir Putin, and the principles underlying successful American foreign policy: Isolationism and appeasement are dangerous.
Ukraine economy:
From the International Monetary Fund, basic Ukraine-economy stats and the mid-year 2025 evaluation.
Lloyd’s List tallies ship arrivals at Odesa, Chornomorsk, and Yuzhnyi.
Politico/EU reports on Ukrainian farming in wartime, oligarchs v. startups, and economic reform.
EU statisticians track Ukraine-European trade flows.
And Germany’s Kiel Institute monitors U.S., European, UK, and other aid programs.
Some “sweetness and light”:
Our March 2024 look at Ukrainian beekeeping, honey, the war, and Black Sea trade.
Agricultural specialist and translator Alisa Koverda explains Ukraine’s beekeeping culture and its wartime adaptation in 2022.
The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization has worldwide data, and USDA has a U.S. closeup.
… and Фундація Жінок Пасічниць (Fundatsiya Zhinok Pasichnish for non-Cyrillic readers; translated, Foundation of Women Beekeepers), with honey contacts and beekeeping tips.
And last:
Special note: We’re proud to note that this Trade Fact is the 200th in our revived series. We are grateful to PPI’s generous supporters for their commitment to our values and work, and we thank friends and readers in the U.S. and worldwide for your ideas, reactions, and occasional critiques.
