Because the Black Sea is a flashpoint between Russia and the West

ISTANBUL – If one were to rank the points on the planet where the US and Russian armies could physically meet, Black Sea It would probably be at 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 Ukraine.

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The downing by a Russian plane 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 flashpoint, accidentally or otherwise.

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

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

The Black Sea is largest in Californiawith six countries on its coast.

Three of those countriesTurkey, Romania and Bulgaria– are members of NATO, while others, including UkraineThey are friends with the alliance, which has long viewed 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 waterways around the world.

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

The Black Sea is extremely important to the efforts of the Russian president Vladimir Putin to expand Moscow’s influence and, as a result, was a source of instability.

In recent years, the surrounding region has witnessed Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008, political riots against Russian-backed leaders in Ukraine and Belarus, and a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2020, finally brokered by Moscow.

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

This strengthened Russia’s position in the Black Sea and gave it control Sevastopolthe only Russian port with warm waters.

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

Russia’s enemies have responded by stepping up their military maneuvers around the Black Sea.

NATO members made 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 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 grain exports from Ukraine, one of the world’s largest producers, raising fears of a deepening hunger crisis in poor nations.

But Turkey helped negotiate a deal supervised by the United Nations which facilitated the export of more than 22 million 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 building up its naval strength against Ukraine with ships from elsewhere, has also prevented US and other countries entering the Black Sea. by NATO.

Right now, only countries with shores 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 these, only Russia and Turkey have powerful navies, Isik said.

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

But the skies are still open, so NATO members have ramped up surveillance flights over and around the sea, and Russia has responded with fighters as a show of strength.

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

About 75 miles south of the Crimea, two Russian warplanes intercepted it and dumped fuel on it, presumably for blur the camera.

The planes also flew close to the drone in a manner that US officials have 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 planes to identify the drone, which it later he maneuvered sharply, lost altitude and fell into the water.

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

Shooting down 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 emphasizes that the potential geography of confrontation and escalation is much broader than one would assume from reading the daily news,” Lesser said.

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