The Black Sea is once again, in the midst of the Russian attack on Ukraine, one of the main theaters of operations. Once again, as in previous centuries and decades, the sea, only open to the Mediterranean through the Turkish straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, is a meeting point and point of tension between the Russian world and the rest of Europe and Turkey.
This mythical place since ancient times is today one of the main fault lines between NATO and Russia.
The Black Sea has been an appetizing morsel for Russia for centuries because it ensures – with Turkish permission – access to warm waters. Its northern ports, for much of the year, were blocked to navigation by ice, which today is broken up with nuclear icebreakers.
The expansion of the Russian Empire reached its shores in 1783, when after the conquest of the Crimean Khanate, Russia, under the command of Tsarina Catherine II, opened the port of Sevastopol, since then a strategic place for the control of these waters.
Ukraine and Crimea were forcibly integrated into the USSR, after years in which, in the heat of the instability of the Russian Revolution (1917), the French and British occupied Odessa and Sevastopol.
Crimea and Sevastopol were Russian and ensured the exit to warm waters of their military fleet. In 1922, Ukraine and Crimea were forcibly integrated into the Soviet Union, after a few years in which, in the heat of the instability caused by the Russian Revolution of 1917, the French and British occupied Odessa and Sevastopol for brief periods. They then helped those known as “white Russians”, the part of the tsarist generalate that resisted with arms the arrival of the Soviets to power.
Before the outbreak of World War II, the 1936 Montreux Convention established when and how Turkey can close the passage of ships through its straits.
The seven decades of the Soviet Union saw no change. As it fell apart, the independent Ukraine controlled Sevastopol and Crimea, leaving Russia without that deep-water port for its Black Sea fleet. Kiev and Moscow cooperated, and the Black Sea, for a few years, seemed more like a region of cooperation than confrontation. .
The fate of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea was a matter of negotiation because legally it had to pass to Russia as the heir to the Soviet Union, but Ukraine controlled its port. Negotiations resulted in an agreement, signed on May 28, 1997, whereby Ukraine would retain 17 per cent of the former Soviet Union’s fleet (80 vessels), and Russia 83 per cent (338 ) and could continue to use the Sevastopol base for 20 renewable years while building a new naval base in Black Sea waters.
The quiet time even gave rise to the creation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization: Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, but also Armenia, Azerbaijan, Albania, Greece and Moldova. In 1999 it began to function, although in a limited way.
The quiet time even gave rise to the creation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization: Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania.
The Russian attack on Georgia in 2008 to prevent its “orange revolution” and the fact that Russia seized the territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Tbilisi broke the peace. After years of blockade and increased tension, the Russian annexation of Ukrainian Crimea in 2014 dashed hopes and increased the military presence in waters to which Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and three NATO member states have access: Turkey (which controls access), Romania and Bulgaria. These last two have been members of the European Union since 2007. Turkey has been a candidate for accession, without much hope, since 1987.
Pavel Anastasov, the former Bulgarian Secretary of State for Defense, explains that Russian influence in the Black Sea since then “has been disastrous.” This former politician turned analyst says that Moscow “tries to foment divisions and revive old conflicts between actors in the region because its objective is to destroy cooperation and undermine confidence in Euro-Atlantic actors.”
Anastasov recalls that most of what we call “frozen conflicts” are on the shores of the Black Sea and that they turn their territories into “gray areas that feed organized crime, illegal trafficking and radicalization. Russia uses these conflicts to politically intimidate other states that became independent after the fall of the Soviet Union”.
Since 2014, and especially since February 24, NATO’s military presence has increased in the Black Sea. Romania and Bulgaria have seen the arrival of contingents of French, Belgian and American soldiers, Spain deployed Eurofighter fighter-bombers.
The Atlantic Alliance seeks with these measures to secure its southeastern flank and protect two militarily weak countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria. Opposite, in the small Sea of Azov, a kind of miniature Black Sea, Russia has been besieging and bombing its main port and city for days, Mariupol, a martyr city of 400,000 inhabitants.
IDAFE MARTIN PEREZ
Special for WEATHER
Brussels
@Idafe Martin Perez
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