Why the Black Sea is a flash point between Russia and the West

ISTANBUL – If you had to rank the points on the planet where the US and Russian armies could physically meet, the Black Sea would probably be near the top of the list.

The gigantic body of water on Europe’s southeastern flank has long been the site of international competition between the United States and its European allies, on the one hand, and Russia and its sphere of influence, on the other, a dynamic that has been exacerbated by the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

This image taken from video released by the Onboard footage of a US Air Force MQ-9 drone as it is boarded by a Russian SU-27 fuel dumping aircraft, over the Black Sea on 14 March 2023. – (Photo by Handout / USEUCOM / AFP) /

The shooting down by Russian aircraft of a US surveillance drone on Tuesday served as a stark reminder to the many countries operating in and around the Black Sea of ​​the region’s potential to become a flash point, accidentally or not.

“It’s always been difficult, it still is, but now the stakes are much higher,” said Ian Lesser, vice president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States research group.

“And the longer the conflict drags on, the greater the risks of things getting out of hand.”

The Black Sea is larger than California, with six countries on its coast.

Three of those countries – Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria – are NATO members, while others, including Ukraine, are friends of the alliance, which has long seen the Black Sea as essential to its efforts to contain Russia.

Turkey has enormous influence over the Black Sea as it controls two straits, the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, which ships must pass through to transit between the Black Sea and other world waterways.

The 1936 Montreux Convention gives Turkey the right to close the straits to most wartime military traffic, a power it exercised after Russia invaded Ukraine last year.

The Black Sea is hugely important to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to expand Moscow’s influence and has been a source of instability as a consequence.

In recent years, the surrounding region has been the scene of Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008, political uprisings against Russian-backed leaders in Ukraine and Belarus, and a 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, ultimately mediated by Moscow.

But Putin’s biggest power play around the Black Sea was the occupation of Crimea, a strategic peninsula that Russia seized from neighboring Ukraine in 2014.

This strengthened Russia’s position on the Black Sea and gave it control of Sevastopol, Russia’s only warm-water port.

In the years since, Putin has increased the Russian naval presence in the Black Sea, to the point that in 2016 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned that the sea had “almost turned into a Russian lake.”

Russia’s enemies responded by intensifying their own military maneuvers around the Black Sea.

NATO members conducted regular surveillance flights, and the United States and Britain often sent warships, even though international conventions prevented them from staying longer than 21 days.

Russia then invaded the Ukraine, prompting both sides to further expand their maneuvers in the area.

“Tensions in the Black Sea obviously amplified after the war,” said Arda Mevlutoglu, an independent Turkish defense analyst.

The war complicated maritime trade for Black Sea nations, and Russia initially blocked the export of grain from Ukraine, one of the world’s top producers, raising fears of an exacerbated hunger crisis in poor nations.

But Turkey helped broker a United Nations-supervised deal that has facilitated the export of more than 22 million metric tons of that grain through Turkish territorial waters.

Turkey’s closure of the strait to most military traffic, which was intended to prevent Russia from reinforcing its naval force against Ukraine with ships from elsewhere, also prevented ships from the United States and other countries from entering the Black Sea. from NATO.

At present, only countries with coastlines on the Black Sea have ships in the water, said Yoruk Isik, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute who closely follows shipping traffic through the Turkish straits.

Of those, only Russia and Turkey have powerful navies, Isik said.

Romania and Bulgaria have smaller forces, Georgia has only a coast guard and the movements of Ukrainian ships are complicated by the war.

But the skies remain open, so NATO members have increased surveillance flights over and around the sea, and Russia has responded with jet fighters as a show of force.

The Pentagon said the drone that went down on Tuesday was unarmed and had taken off from Romania for a routine surveillance flight.

Some 75 miles south of Crimea, two Russian warplanes intercepted him, dropping fuel on him, presumably to blur his camera.

The planes also flew close to the drone in a manner that US officials described as dangerous.

One of the jets collided with the drone’s propeller, prompting its US operators to shoot it down, according to the Pentagon.

The Russian Defense Ministry told a different story, saying in a statement that the Russian air force had deployed fighter jets to identify the drone, which then swerved, lost altitude and plunged into the water.

In recent months, US authorities had feared that some kind of incident over the Black Sea, even an accidental collision or a communication error, could get out of hand.

The downing of the drone has heightened tensions between the United States and Russia, although neither side has been willing to allow the situation to escalate.

But analysts say the war in Ukraine has sparked so much more military activity in and around the Black Sea and elsewhere that the longer it goes on, the greater the chances of such incidents.

“It just points out that the potential geography of confrontation and escalation is much broader than one might assume from reading the daily news,” Lesser said.

c.2023 The New York Times Company

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