Port Pivdennyi has taken missile and drone strikes throughout the war. But something shifted after an appointment made in early 2026. The strikes didn’t come more often. Their aim drastically improved.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF STRIKE
One morning last spring, a missile hit an administrative building deep inside Port Pivdennyi – an office where Ukrainian staff sat at their desks every working day. The building doesn’t show up on satellite imagery. It isn’t marked on any public map. In order to know it was there, to know it was worth a missile, you had to have walked the place, worked beside the people inside it, and been willing to hand that knowledge to the country trying to kill them.
For most of the war, Russian fire on Ukraine’s ports followed a pattern military analysts call area targeting: missile strikes meant to gum up operations without much idea of what sits where. Cranes, access roads, terminals, all hit along the general outline of a port rather than anything specific inside it. Blunt, and mostly predictable.
Then Yuriy Furtatov was appointed Chief Engineer of Port Pivdennyi, and the missile strikes started finding things area targeting never finds. Administrative offices. State-owned tugboats sitting at specific berths. Infrastructure nodes too small to read at standard satellite resolution and absent from every public map. These are targets you locate by knowing the facility from the inside.
WHAT THE CHIEF ENGINEER KNOWS
The Chief Engineer knows the port better than anyone. That’s the job – to hold, and keep updating, the documentation on every system in the facility.
Where each building is and what it’s for. The coordinates of fuel storage and backup power. When state vessels are berthed and where. Which internal roads reach which critical infrastructure. The structural weak points of the installations that matter. And beyond the hardware, the human timetable: which areas run at which hours, which offices fill up between 7 and 8 in the morning, which sit empty at dawn.
In peacetime, that’s just the knowledge that keeps a port running. In a port in a country at war, held by an engineer who – as this series has documented – was recruited by Russian military intelligence, it’s a targeting package with a name on it.
THE DAMAGE
The economic toll compounds everything laid out in the previous installment. Tugboats don’t get replaced on a whim. The state-owned vessels that guide large cargo ships into berth take months to source once they’re gone – longer than that in a country fighting a war. And an administrative building, once it’s hit, it doesn’t rebuild itself while the missiles are still coming.
Throughput at the port had already collapsed, from 1.1 million tons a month to 200,000. Now the physical destruction was arriving on top of the economic bleed.
But the numbers aren’t the whole cost. On a working day, hundreds of people are inside Port Pivdennyi – dock workers, engineers, vessel crews, administrative staff. They arrive each morning and sit at desks in buildings whose exact coordinates live in the Chief Engineer’s files.
A missile that hits an office during working hours isn’t aimed at the concrete. Someone who knows the port’s schedule knows more than a grid reference. They know the shift patterns. They know which building is empty before dawn and full two hours later. They know where the tugboat crews sleep on the nights they stay aboard.
Better Russian satellites don’t account for that kind of precision. A person inside the port, who knew what to pass along and when, does.
WHAT THIS ADDS UP TO
Take any single fact here and it can be explained away. A discounted property in Bulgaria. A director with no maritime background. An engineer with a documented history working for Russian military intelligence. Strikes landing with new precision on a facility where that same engineer holds the technical keys.
Put them side by side and the coincidences run out. Ukraine’s largest port has been captured on paper, stripped economically, and now hit with an accuracy that simply wasn’t there before this network was in place – years in the making, assembled a piece at a time, by people willing to wait until they needed all of it at once.
No door was ever kicked in. They used a notary’s office in Bulgaria, a ministerial appointment in Kyiv, and a job posting nobody ever bothered to explain. By the time the strikes started finding their targets, the work was already done.
The port is still running. The people named in this series are still in their jobs.
NEXT: Port of Shadows | Part 5 | The Method – Final