A Naval Dustup Over a Dam Too Far

By VLADIMIR SOCOR

            Relations between Russia and Ukraine have rarely been easy since 1991, but this week they physically clashed at sea for the first time. The naval incident took place in the Kerch Strait, which connects the Black and Azov seas, while separating Ukraine’s Crimea from Russia’s North Caucasus. In the broad daylight of Tuesday, Oct. 21, Russian and Ukrainian coast guard cutters bumped and circled each other after a Russian tugboat trespassed the Ukrainian maritime border, which Russia says it does not recognize.

            Ukrainian coastal guard cutters detained, boarded and searched the intruding Russian tugboat, but released it after Russian coastal guard cutters arrived at the scene. The Russian tugboat crew had been photographing and filming the border installations--such as elevated observation posts and hedgehog obstacles against heavy vehicles--that Ukraine is feverishly erecting on its Tuzla islet.

            Tuesday’s clash was perhaps inevitable, given what has been going on for the past month. With almost no international notice, and while Ukraine’s Western partners seem to be looking away, a territorial dispute has artificially been triggered in the Kerch Strait. Under a plan recently approved by President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s Ministry for Emergency Situations--a military institution--is building a dam far out into the Kerch Strait, so as to change its geography and median line, and wrest control of navigation there from Ukraine.

            As of this writing, the Russian dam has reached 3.5 kilometers into the Strait, within only 100 meters of Ukraine’s maritime border, and another 150 meters from the Ukrainian-owned and -inhabited islet of Tuzla, which commands the Strait. Ukraine fears that the dam will connect Tuzla to the Russian mainland, thereby wresting the islet from Ukraine and enabling Russia to claim control of the deep navigation channel, owned since 1991 by the independent state of Ukraine.

            The move has caused a political outcry in Ukraine (forcing even Russian-oriented elements there to complain) and overshadowed NATO Secretary-General George Robertson’s Oct. 20 visit to Kiev. Both countries have deployed gunboats in the area. Ukrainian officials from the president and prime minister on down have been saying that they are determined to stop the dam’s advance into their territory, but only by means of physical obstacles, not by shooting; and are appealing to Russia to abjure the use of force.

            The situation is being watched with concern by some other post-Soviet countries, with which Russia has refused to sign or ratify border agreements, potentially leaving the demarcation of borders open to unilateral Russian challenges or in a less-than-certain situation.         

            Russian officials on Oct. 21 and 22 for the first time publicly challenged the legitimacy of Ukraine’s maritime border and its possession of Tuzla. In Moscow, for instance, Dmitry Rogozin--chairman of the Russian Duma’s international affairs committee, and a close political ally of Mr. Putin--declared that “Ukraine has unlawfully seized Tuzla” [in 1991] and now “raises a hullaballoo over it.”

            Mr. Putin himself has not said a word on the situation since the Sept. 29 start of the dam construction. He and other top officials have ignored the Ukrainian leaders’ requests for information. Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma was reduced to wondering aloud during his October 17 press conference: “I look at Russia’s map and I ask: doesn’t it have enough land ?”

            Last month, however, Mr. Putin approved a “Plan for Interagency Cooperation to Carry Out Diplomatic and Military Tasks in the Azov-Black Sea Region.” It envisages measures to control, and install military infrastructure on, certain locations on coasts and on islands. Then on Sept. 29, the Russian side launched the dam construction operation into the Kerch Strait, without notifying Ukraine and without providing any serious explanation since then. (Half-hearted assertions that the dam is meant to protect the Russian side of the Kerch Strait from erosion do not seem serious, and are in any case contradicted by the Russian officials who question the maritime border). The construction operation is said to employ some two thousand workers and hundreds of vehicles and earth-moving machines; it had to be planned in advance, and it was sprung on Ukraine surreptitiously.

            Under international law, the pre-1991 Soviet inter-republican borders are the post-1991 inter-state borders. This principle is accepted by all parties (including, officially, Russia) as the basis of the post-Soviet territorial order, and is so codified in international law. The Tuzla islet and the deep navigation channel in the Kerch Strait had, long before 1991, formed an administrative part of the municipality of Kerch in the Crimea, thus belonging to the Soviet Ukraine--as shown also on all official maps before 1991--and to independent Ukraine afterward. All along, the Ukrainian port authority in Kerch has administered and maintained the deep navigable channel, and collected the shipping tolls.

            The Russian-Ukrainian “friendship treaty,” signed by the presidents in 1997 and ratified by the parliaments the following year, enshrined the existing borders between the two countries; this meant that Russia had dropped any claims to the Crimea or parts thereof. Hence the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry’s Oct. 20 statement that “any attempts to cast doubt on the validity of those documents can only be regarded as raising territorial claims on Ukraine.”

            The Russia-Ukraine maritime borders, however, are not delimited by treaty. Ukraine seeks sectoral and median-line division in accordance with international law in the Kerch Strait and the Azov Sea. Moscow, however, seeks to impose on Ukraine a “joint-use” regime. Negotiations have been going on quietly for years. Now, Mr. Putin seems to have lost patience with negotiations, and bent on showing who’s boss in the “near abroad.”

            Russian construction operations have accelerated in recent days, proceeding night and day and irrespective of weather conditions. This week Russia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Igor Ivanov repeated that negotiations on the status of the Kerch Strait and Azov Sea would only be held on Oct 30. By that date, Russia may well have created the planned fait accompli, forcing Ukraine to accept de facto changes in the Kerch Strait’s geography and legal status, and encroaching on Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Mr. Socor is a senior fellow of the Washington-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.