Russia’s worsening relations with Ukraine, which culminated with the March 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, are a toxic brew of issues dating back to the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, including natural gas pricing disputes, the status of Sevastopol, post-Soviet space “color revolutions,” and NATO’s seemingly unstoppable incorporation of former Warsaw Pact members and former Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. As for Ukrainian aspirations to join NATO, in 2002 President Leonid Kuchma announced that Ukraine would eventually seek full alliance membership.
Russia’s 17 March annexation of Crimea, along with its detention of the bulk of the Ukrainian navy, has upended the geopolitics of the Black Sea, producing a tactical quandary for NATO forces there and in the eastern Mediterranean. It is the second time in six years that the Russian military has neutralized the Black Sea forces of a former Soviet republic.
While the West has consistently dismissed Russian concerns about NATO’s further expansion into the post-Soviet space, the issue has always been of paramount importance to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who used it to justify his actions in Crimea. Putin made clear that his decision to invade and annex Crimea was heavily driven by a desire to thwart Ukrainian membership in NATO, when he stated during his annual call-in television program on 17 April, “If we do not do anything, Ukraine will be drawn into NATO sometime in the future . . . and NATO ships would dock in Sevastopol, the city of Russia’s naval glory.” Expanding on his theme, Putin added, “We were once promised (I was in Munich at the time speaking about this at a security conference) that after the unification of Germany NATO would not expand eastwards. As for the eastern borders of NATO, the then–Secretary General of NATO told us that the alliance would not move them. And then it started to expand and to include former Warsaw Pact countries, and then the Baltic former Soviet republics.”1
During his biannual speech to Russia’s diplomatic corps on 1 July, Putin said:
What was the reaction our partners expected from us about this, as to how events unfolded in Ukraine? We, of course, had no right to abandon the residents of the Crimea and Sevastopol to the tyranny of armed nationalists and radicals, and we were not able to tolerate a substantial limitation of our access to the Black Sea, to the Crimean land, to Sevastopol, infused with the martial glory of Russian soldiers and sailors, when all is said and done. And I think NATO troops would have arrived fairly quickly, which would have fundamentally changed the balance of forces in the Black Sea. That is, practically everything that Russia had fought for since the time of Peter the Great, and perhaps before, historians know better—all this would actually be erased.2
Ukraine provided Putin with his excuse for intervention.
The Ties That Bind
Ukraine’s relationship with NATO dates back to the implosion of the Soviet Union. NATO-Ukraine relations were formally launched in 1991, when the country joined the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. In February 1995 Ukraine became the first Commonwealth of Independent States member to join NATO’S Partnership for Peace (PfP) program. In 2001 Ukraine became the first NATO PfP affiliate to provide a warship for the alliance’s Operation Active Endeavor Mediterranean naval-surveillance and interdiction campaign. In 2013 Ukraine became the first PfP member to assign a warship to NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield antipiracy maritime mission off the Horn of Africa.3
Given Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline, it was inevitable that its NATO military cooperation would primarily be maritime. With Russian concerns about its southern maritime borders, joint NATO-Ukrainian Black Sea naval exercises were certain to heighten Russian-Ukrainian tensions.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet had rented naval facilities in Sevastopol since Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. On 28 May 1997, Russia and Ukraine signed the Partition Treaty, establishing two independent national fleets and dividing armaments and bases between them. Treaty terms stipulated that Crimean units of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet were to be partitioned. Russia received 81.7 percent and Ukraine the remaining 18.3 percent, with Russia maintaining the right to use Sevastopol in Ukraine for two decades, until 2017.4
If Russia had thought the treaty would resolve outstanding issues in Russian-Ukrainian relations and that Kyiv would take account of Russia’s concerns about the status of the Black Sea, that illusion didn’t last long. On 25 August 1997 NATO warships from Turkey, Greece, Italy and the United States and PfP affiliates Bulgaria, Georgia, and Romania arrived at the Ukrainian Naval Forces’ Donuzlav base in western Crimea to join Ukrainian ships in the first NATO-sponsored Sea Breeze 97 exercise, which would field 20 ships and 300 marines over eight days. In an eerie echo of 2013 events, although invited, PfP member Russia declined an invitation from Ukraine’s Defense Ministry to participate, considering the exercise’s original scenario—NATO forces assisting Ukraine in combating armed separatists—too confrontational. Sea Breeze 98, in which Russia participated, was held in Ukraine in October–November 1998 near Odessa, not in Crimea.
Ukraine’s participation in the Sea Breeze exercises divided the Ukrainian public, many of whom tended to view it as part of a larger pro-NATO agenda, with Ukraine’s stronger affiliation with NATO perceived negatively by a majority of Ukrainians. A December 2012 public-opinion poll conducted by the Ukrainian Democratic Initiatives Foundation think tank determined that of those polled, 74.3 percent of people from east Ukraine, 73.9 percent from southern Ukraine, 52.3 percent from the country’s center, and 39.2 percent from western Ukraine answered negatively to the question of whether Ukraine should join NATO.5
Another irritant in Russian-Ukrainian relations was Russia’s five-day conflict with Georgia in August 2008. The Black Sea Fleet deployed 13 warships that decimated the Georgian navy and landed troops in Abkhazia and Poti during the brief war.6 After the Black Sea Fleet sailed, then–Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko ordered tighter restrictions on Russian ship movements in Ukrainian territorial waters. New regulations demanded that Russia ask for permission up to ten days before its vessels entered or left Sevastopol. After pointing out that the new constraints were illegal, Russia effectively ignored the restrictions, but the incident caused lingering rancor.7
While Russia prevailed in its clash with Georgia, it produced two unwelcome consequences—a surge of NATO warships into the Black Sea, and a sobering reevaluation of the Black Sea Fleet’s capabilities. The first was met with bluster; the second would lead the Russian Federation Navy to consider making its first large-scale warship purchases since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After bragging that the Black Sea Fleet could destroy within 20 minutes the five NATO warships sent to the Black Sea following the Russo-Georgian conflict, the former commander of the fleet, Admiral Eduard Baltin, called the body of water a “mousetrap,” commenting, “You can enter here, but if confrontation occurs it is very difficult to get out. An enemy here would be exposed not only to warships, but also aviation and coastal defense systems.”8
Behind Baltin’s braggadocio, the grim reality of the Russian navy in the aftermath of the Russian-Georgian clash was that it was an aging fleet in decline. The conflict highlighted the mediocre performance of much of the Russian military’s equipment, causing the Russian government to consider European military imports, while the global financial crisis and Europe’s subsequent sluggish economic recovery made politicians desperate for any opportunities to boost jobs and exports. The high point of French military sales to Russia was to be the sale of two Mistral-class amphibious-assault ships under a 2011 contract, Russia’s first major foreign warships and NATO’s largest military sale to Russia.
Seizing Sevastopol, Capturing Ships
At the time of its capture in March, the Ukrainian navy possessed 26 warships and more than 50 support vessels.9 Severe underfunding meant the navy had only one warship capable of full-scale combat operations, the 3,500 ton, 21-year-old current flagship, the frigate Get’man Sagaidachnii.10
Among the warships taken over by the Russians in Sevastopol were the Grisha V-class corvettes Khmel’nits’kii, Vinnitsa, Ternopil, and Luts’k; the Pauk-class corvette/patrol vessel Khmelnytskyi; the Konstiantin Ol’shans’kii and Kirovograd amphibious landing ships; the 22-year-old Bambuk-class former Ukrainian navy flagship Slavutych; the minesweepers Chetkasy and Chernigiv; the oceangoing tug Korets; the command ship Donbas, the trawler Geniches’k, and other vessels, including Ukraine’s only submarine, the Foxtrot-class Zaporizhzhia.11 Of the Ukrainian navy’s warships, only three were less than 20 years old, and the remainder were in urgent need of modernization. In 2012 the Ukrainian navy commander warned that if sufficient funding was not forthcoming, the fleet within five years could dwindle to five warships.12 The only vessels that eluded Russian capture were either based in Odessa, outside of Crimea, were at sea (the Get’man Sagaidachnii) or were part of Ukraine’s riverine force.
On 20 March, three days after the Russian annexation of Crimea, Russia’s permanent representative to NATO, Aleksandr Grushko, commented during a forum in Brussels, “We don’t need permission from NATO and you to act in line with international law. And Crimea was absolutely a legitimate case. And I do believe that NATO should acknowledge that fact and since NATO is a club of democratic countries, should accept this democratic choice of the Crimean people. . . . NATO is free to take any decision and Russia is free to take any decision to protect its legitimate security interests.”13 On 1 April at a NATO summit in Brussels, after noting that NATO accounted for approximately half of global military spending, Grushko commented, “If you compare their budget with that of Russia, then the Russian military budget is at least ten times smaller than the total military budgets of NATO members. Moreover, the alliance is superior in all major categories of weapons.”14 Despite NATO’s budgetary superiority, on 13 May the Russian navy’s commander-in-chief, Admiral Viktor Chirkov, stated that the Black Sea Fleet would receive 30 new warships over the next six years, following an earlier statement by Defence Minister General Sergei Shoigu that the Black Sea Fleet will receive more than $2.3 billion in developmental funding by 2020.15
NATO Responds
Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its relations with NATO have devolved into tactical checkmate, with each NATO deployment being countered by a carefully calibrated similar Russian exercise. The Crimean crisis had an immediate impact on NATO’s Immediate Reaction Forces, the Standing NATO Maritime Groups One and Two and the Standing NATO Maritime Mine-Countermeasures Groups One (SNMCMG1) and Two (SNMCMG2), which were deployed in waters adjacent to Russia. The month after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, NATO’s North Atlantic Council decided to enhance collective defense and assurance measures in response to the crisis in Ukraine and reactivated SNMCMG1, on 22 April deploying five NATO mine-hunting ships to the Baltic in an exercise that continued under Norwegian command until the end of May.
On July 3 SNMCMG2 entered the Black Sea to participate with the Rumanian and Bulgarian navies in the Breeze naval exercise, the successor to the Sea Breeze exercises held there since 1997.16 The same day, SNMCMG1 warships arrived in Klaipeda, Lithuania.17 The nine-day-long Breeze naval exercise began on 4 July off Bulgaria in the western Black Sea, 150 miles from the Crimean peninsula, with 15 U.S., Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, and Turkish ships and support vessels from SNMCMG2.18 Bulgaria’s defense ministry said that the exercise had been scheduled before Russia annexed Crimea.
In response, that same day the Black Sea Fleet deployed 20 warships and auxiliary vessels, along with more than 20 aircraft and helicopters, marines, and coastal artillery units in a combined exercise ranging across the entire Black Sea.
NATO’s efforts to increase its naval presence in the Black Sea remain constrained by the 78-year-old Montreux Convention. Non–Black Sea state warships in the straits must be under 15,000 tons. No more than nine non–Black Sea state warships, with a total aggregate tonnage of less than 45,000 tons as measured against the strongest Black Sea force (now Russia’s Black Sea Fleet), may pass at any one time, and they are permitted to stay in the Black Sea for no more than 21 days at a time.19
Vacating the Black Sea under the provisions of the Montreux Convention, SNMCMG2 arrived in Istanbul on 23 July, after making port visits in Varna, Bulgaria, and Constanta, Romania. Besides purely military maneuvers, the governments of many NATO EU member states, led by Washington, are considering sanctions against Russia for its Ukrainian policy.
In addition to increased NATO deployments around Russia’s periphery, the EU, prodded by the United States, has been imposing an increasingly harsh series of sanctions on Russia. The litmus test for unified EU sanctions is the pair of Mistral-class vessels being built in France for the Russian navy, which Baltic and Central European NATO members, along with the United States and Britain, are urging the Hollande government to cancel.
While Russia’s Mistral contracts have excited the most concern among NATO members, the fact is that in late 2009 when the deal was first being discussed, the Russian navy was considering naval purchases from other NATO members as well, in particular possibly acquiring Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft AG (HDW)-built Type 212 German submarines, equipped with advanced fuel-cell propulsion systems.20
In June 2011 France signed a $1.7 billion contract to build two 23,700-ton Mistrals for Russia, a move that represents Russia’s biggest arms purchase from abroad and a break with decades of military self-sufficiency, the first such purchase from a NATO member. (The fate of the deal, suspended by France in September, remains in limbo at press time.) The vessel can deploy 900 marines, 4 landing barges, 40 assault vehicles, and 16 helicopters, and is equipped with a 69-bed hospital as well as acting as a floating command center for 150 military staff. In the aftermath of Russia’s armed clash with Georgia, the news prompted widespread unease in Eastern Europe and among Black Sea nations. Russia had long realized the value of the Mistrals; in September 2009 Russian naval chief Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky had boasted that if Russia had possessed such warships in 2008, it would have won its war against Georgia in “40 minutes instead of 26 hours.”21 Russia’s struggling shipbuilders opposed the purchase from the outset, arguing that instead of buying a French warship the government should have instead invested in domestic production.
Putin Grows the Fleet
The revival of the Black Sea Fleet is of personal interest to Putin, who on 17 April instructed the government and the defence ministry to begin to draft a development program for the force. Between the end of 2014 and 2017, the Black Sea Fleet is to get six new frigates and six diesel-powered submarines.22
On 27 July, Russia’s Navy Day, the Russian media highlighted a report by UK-based Jane’s Information Group, which concluded that an arms embargo against Russia would be largely symbolic because Russia is largely self-sufficient in armament production.23
The deteriorating situation in eastern Ukraine has led Russian authorities to suspend the repatriation of ships and military equipment remaining in Crimea to Ukrainian control until a ceasefire is concluded. Speaking in Rostov-on-Don to journalists on 24 July, the head of the Southern Military District Staff’s naval department, Rear Admiral Anatoly Dolgov, said, “The process of transferring Ukraine ships, weapons, and military equipment has not been completed” because of concerns that the materiel could be used against separatists.24 This included the remaining 21 Ukrainian naval vessels of the 66 seized by Russian forces, of which 45 had already been transferred.
The Russian navy has lost no time in upgrading its new possession. In a reorganization scheduled to last through December, force restructuring has seen the number of personnel assigned to Crimea nearly double. Two new frigates, the Admiral Grigorovich and Admiral Essen, are scheduled to join the Black Sea Fleet before the end of the year. By the time the fleet’s rearmament program is complete in 2020, the navy estimates that its combat potential will increase by 40 percent compared to its current level.25 Crimea’s coastal defenses are also being upgraded with a coastal defense brigade and an artillery regiment.26 Russia’s Ministry of Defence also intends to deploy a number of aviation assets, including upgraded Sukhoi Su-25SM, Su-27SM, naval aviation Su-30 and MiG-29 fighters, Il-38N antisubmarine aircraft and Ka-27, Ka-29M, and naval Ka-52K helicopters, along with long-range bombers.27
The Kremlin’s plans for upgrading its Black Sea naval forces will be made easier by the acquisition of seven Crimean shipyards—Kranship (Kerch), Stekloplastik (Feodosiia), More Shipbuilding (Feodosiia), Zaliv Shipyard (Kerch), Metallist Shipyard (Balaklava), Sevastopol Shipyard, and MIK Shipyard (also in Sevastopol).28
‘Geostrategic Checkmate’
Russia’s seizure of the Crimea after a plebiscite there ultimately represents a delayed tectonic political fracture dating back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Russia’s possession of Sevastopol and the government’s announced plans to strengthen the Black Sea Fleet do not change the fact that since 1991, Russia has had de facto maritime superiority there, which is greatly constrained from exiting to the Mediterranean by the Montreux Convention as NATO powers are from entering, producing geostrategic checkmate. Unlike the years of the Cold War, when the Black Sea’s sole NATO member was Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania are now in NATO, while Ukraine and Georgia are NATO PfP members, as is Russia, at least for the moment.
The United States and the EU do not recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea and accuse Moscow of meddling in Ukrainian domestic politics, charges that Russia denies, while Ukraine officially considers all of the Crimea, including Sevastopol, to be “territory temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation.” In retrospect, what is most striking is that NATO did not heed Putin’s persistent warnings over the past six years about NATO expansion.
At the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, the Bush administration advocated both Georgia and Ukraine being fast-tracked for NATO membership. On the last day of the summit, Putin unambiguously made his concerns explicit, stating, “The presence of a powerful military bloc on our borders, whose members are guided by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, will be seen as a direct threat to our national security.”29 The Russian government thereafter emphatically characterized NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia as “red lines” that the alliance should not cross.30 Given the fact that both nations share Black Sea coastline with NATO members Rumania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, continuing NATO maritime exercises there under the constraints of the Montreux Convention is one, albeit expensive, alliance option.
A second, less problematic possibility would be increased NATO exercises and deployments in the Aegean off the entrance to the Dardanelles, as well as in the eastern Mediterranean off Syria, where the civil war shows no sign of abating. Given the strategic importance of both the Turkish Straits and the Suez Canal and their proximity to a hot-conflict zone, Moscow could hardly object, and maintaining a continuous maritime presence in the eastern Mediterranean would be both less expensive and politically contentious than Black Sea deployments. The unresolved questions are whether the political will and funding would be available for such long-term postings, or whether a possible diplomatic resolution would lessen their need.
While the eventual outcome of the Western-Russian standoff over Ukraine is unclear, NATO needs to recognize that Crimea’s annexation and Russia’s subsequent strengthening of the Black Sea Fleet will dominate Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean maritime realities for the foreseeable future, giving Russia increased options for asserting regional if temporary “command of the sea.” In the long term, NATO planners will realize, after the heat of the moment passes, the truth of Admiral Baltin’s designation of the Black Sea as a “mousetrap,” but a rodent-trapping device that limits the Black Sea Fleet, which since its founding in 1783, can only exit the Black Sea via the Turkish Straits, under control of a NATO member. Now is the time for NATO strategists to take the long view, realizing that the Black Sea Fleet remains as constrained as it was prior to the Crimean War.
Dr. Daly, a former international correspondent for United Press International, is a non-resident senior scholar at the Central Asia Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of International Studies in Washington, D.C. The author of Russian Seapower and the Eastern Question, 1827–41 (Naval Institute Press, 1991), he has worked on issues regarding Russia, Turkey, Central Asia, and the Caucasus for more than 30 years.