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January 2026 in European agricultural policy was not marked by grand strategies or visionary reforms. Instead, it was the month of a "hard collision" between expectations and reality. The key takeaway from the start of the year is unambiguous: the center of gravity in decision-making has shifted from the supranational level of the European Commission to the national capitals of Member States. For the EU, this is an era of caution; for Ukraine, it is a signal that the rules of engagement have fundamentally changed. 

In the first half of the MY 2025/26  (July–December 2025), Ukraine exported 7.8 million tons of wheat and 1.3 million tons of barley, according to data from the State Customs Service of Ukraine. At the same time, the average rate of grain exports was 30% lower than in the same period of the 2024/25 marketing year, according to the FAS USDA report.

Ukrainian farmers will sow 22–23 million hectares with crops in 2026, if the front line does not change significantly. This opinion was expressed by Pavlo Koval, Director General of the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation, in an interview with Mind.

He noted that almost 6 million hectares of the indicated area have already been sown with winter crops: 570 thousand hectares of winter barley and 1.1 million hectares of winter rapeseed, about 70 thousand hectares of winter rye and 4.8 million hectares of wheat.

Ukraine imported 3.285 million tons of fertilizers in 2025, which is 13% more than a year earlier.

“Growth occurred in almost all types of fertilizers, but the supply of nitrogen fertilizers increased significantly,” analysts note.

And they add that the market has significant transitional reserves of fertilizers in certain very important groups.