Slyusar told the Rossiya 24 television channel that the drones damaged quay walls, storage tanks and transshipment facilities. About 7,000 people work at the three ports, and the operating companies have so far avoided mass layoffs, continuing to pay wages, rent and loans in order to keep skilled staff, he said.
"They are going through difficult times too. All three of our ports: Rostov, Taganrog and Azov: operations are effectively suspended. At the same time the loans remain, the obligation to pay wages remains," Slyusar said.
"If they fire professional people now, tomorrow everything will come back, but it will unfortunately be hard to bring people back to work," he explained.
Slyusar warned that without radical support the sector could be lost. "If we do not radically help this industry now, we will lose it. This is a problem not only for the Rostov region, but also for nearby regions, for Krasnodar Krai," the governor said.
He proposed a moratorium on tax payments for the ports, preferential loans on the same terms as those given to farmers, and rent holidays on infrastructure owned by Rosmorport, the state agency that manages Russia's port assets.
According to Slyusar, systematic drone attacks began immediately after the grain harvest got under way, hitting port infrastructure first and then vessels. This led to "the de facto freezing of shipping in the Azov and then the Black Sea basin."
On October 20 Slyusar said port and shipping companies in the region faced bankruptcy and that cargo transshipment had fallen by 45%.
The Azov ports have barely operated since July 10, when, after a series of Ukrainian drone attacks on vessels, Russia halted shipping along the Azov-Don Canal and stopped accepting applications for passage through the Kerch Strait. Analysts estimated that about a quarter of Russia's wheat exports had previously moved through the Sea of Azov.
On August 28 the Rostov region introduced a regional-level state of emergency. A governor's order said that because of the port shutdown, agricultural producers had accumulated "significant volumes" of goods.
Reuters calculated that in September Russia exported just 0.3 million tonnes of grain through the Black and Azov seas, against 4.74 million tonnes in September last year. Export volumes along those routes fell about 16-fold year on year.
In late October the authorities began for the first time since July allowing grain carriers out of the ports of Temryuk and Kavkaz in Krasnodar Krai through the Kerch Strait, Bloomberg reported. But the passage permits are valid only until November 15, Reuters specified.
In total, about 400 vessels have been damaged in the region over the past six months as a result of both Russian and Ukrainian attacks, according to estimates by the analytics company Ambrey Analytics.