This year’s grain harvest in Ukraine exceeds expectations and could be 5 percent higher than in 2022, thanks to favorable weather, a senior official of the Ministry of Agriculture in Kyiv said on Saturday.

Ukraine is a major global producer and exporter of grain, but its production has been affected by the large-scale Russian invasion that began in February 2022.

“This (harvest) is bigger than expected; Thanks to good weather and summer rains, production may be 5% higher than in 2022,” said Taras Vysotskyi, the first deputy minister of agriculture, on national television.

He did not name the approximate volume of the harvest, but noted that farmers have already threshed about 23 million tons of grain.

The Ministry of Agriculture of Ukraine said this week that it expects grain production in 2023 to be around 56.4 million tons, which is 2% more than in 2022.

He also reported that on August 11, farmers harvested 17.7 million tons of wheat and 4.9 million tons of barley, and grain production averaged 4.37 tons per hectare.