The report, published Sunday for the week to 21 August, keeps its own hedge: the Black Sea has "gone a little quiet", while "charterers and owners alike are still seeing problems persist". The route's 12 August print of $440,948 a day stood as the highest since 2008; Thursday's settlement runs about 9% below it. The premium is easing while everything that built it stands.
CPC itself is still not speaking. The newest post on the consortium's verified channel is dated 30 July, 25 days ago; the July loading total is unpublished, and no official Kazakh loss figure has appeared in the wires the desk reads.
Novorossiysk's grain berths stay dark too: no restart of the NKHP and NZT terminals has surfaced since the overnight strike of 11-12 August, and Monday's positive sweep found none.
The premium is easing while everything that built it stands.
One vessel thread moved. The tanker Aegean Dream, dark since 10 August after showing a CPC destination, was back on AIS on Monday: two trackers place it in the eastern Mediterranean at 12.3 knots for Valletta, due the same evening. That is transponder data from aggregators; no outlet has reported the passage.
The rate had become the war's cleanest gauge of what the route costs, and it has started down with the carve-out unacknowledged in Astana and Moscow, the operator silent and the grain half of the harbour idle. Cheaper escort, same gauntlet.