NATO and Ukraine have found a way to get grain carriers through the Black Sea past the Russian blockade. According to one observer, the risk is high.
Munich/Ismail – Are Ukraine and NATO taking a big risk in the Black Sea? Sergei Wakulenko, a former manager of the state-owned Russian energy company Gazprom Neft and now an expert at the Carnegie Center think tank, supports this thesis.
Said defense alliance NATO had devised a trick to defeat the Russian blockade in the Black Sea to bypass. In mid-July, Russia withdrew from the grain agreement with Kiev and instead began bombing the huge port of Odessa on the Black Sea coast – the largest transhipment point for grain shipments.
However, on August 1, three freighters, under the surveillance of NATO aircraft, drove along the coast of Bulgaria and Romania to the Ukrainian Danube port of Izmail directly on the Romanian border, which the Kremlin then ordered to be attacked from the air. Wakulenko now warns that it is precisely because of this “move” in the Ukraine war a “direct confrontation” between Russia and NATO could threaten.
Russian blockade in the Black Sea: Is Ukraine acting with calculation?
“Ukraine will certainly try to break through the grain blockade by inviting into its ports ships flying the flags of those countries that Russia is unlikely to dare to attack. There is evidence that an attack on a ship flying the flag of a NATO country would be considered an act of aggression and would trigger Article 5 of the NATO Charter, leading to a direct conflict between NATO and Russia,” energy expert Wakulenko wrote in one Guest article for the Serbian daily newspaper politics. Therefore, “Ukrainian exports with such ships could be seen as a kind of gambit: Russia must either refrain from attacks or create a pretext for a direct military confrontation with NATO countries,” he explained in his analysis.
According to his thesis, Kiev is at least interested in such a threatening scenario, but there are no official indications of this. How closely Wakulenko is still involved with the regime in the Kremlin cannot be independently verified. Gazprom has long been seen as a lever for Moscow to put pressure on the West about the reliability of energy supplies and supplies.
Ukraine will certainly try to break through the grain blockade by inviting into its ports ships flying the flags of those countries that Russia is unlikely to dare to attack.
Russian blockade in the Black Sea: Further attacks on Ukrainian Danube ports expected
Striking: Among the freighters that reached the Danube coming from the Bosporus at the beginning of August was a ship flying the Turkish flag. The government in Ankara has comparatively great influence and contact with Moscow ruler Vladimir Putin. An accident? Russia will at least continue “bombing Ukraine’s ports to limit their export opportunities,” says Wakulenko.
It can be assumed that the Russian armed forces will try to attack the Ukrainian Danube ports of Reni and Izmail again, although “the approaches to them are almost exclusively in Romania’s sovereign waters, which protects the ships sailing to them to a certain extent”. Bucharest protested publicly after the bombing earlier this month. Are Ukraine and NATO taking too big a risk? (pm)
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