Why the Black Sea is key to Russia’s Ukraine invasion

The international community must act to end a Russian blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports that threatens to trigger a global food shortage, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned.

Moscow’s invading troops have “pounded” the southern Ukrainian port of Odesa with missile strikes in recent days, Al Jazeera reported. Following aerial attacks on Monday that “hit a shopping centre and a depot, killing one person and injuring five others”, Zelenskyy said that “for the first time in decades, there is no usual movement of the merchant fleet, no usual port functioning in Odesa”.

“Probably this has never happened in Odesa since World War Two,” he continued in a video address. And “without our agricultural exports, dozens of countries in different parts of the world are already on the brink of food shortages”.

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Pressure point

Kyiv would be cut off from the Black Sea, “through which more than 70% of its cargo is exported”, if Russia can “seize southern Ukraine, connecting the Russian-occupied parts of the Donbas region to the breakaway statelet of Transnistria in Moldova���, said The Economist.

So far, the “naval aspect of this mooted assault is stalling”.

Moscow has about 20 warships and submarines stationed in the Black Sea, but “its ability to mount a naval offensive or to land troops has been curtailed by Ukrainian missiles”. The besieged country’s defenders scored a significant coup in mid April when Neptune missiles sank the Moskova, “a warship that was one of the Russian navy’s crown jewels”, the paper added.

Russia has since shifted to targeting land infrastructure. European Council President Charles Michel was shown “silos full of grain, wheat and corn”in Odesa that cannot be exported, during a visit this week for talks with Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal that was “interrupted by a missile attack”, Al Jazeera reported.

“This badly needed food is stranded because of the Russian war and blockade of Black Sea ports, causing dramatic consequences for vulnerable countries,” Michel told reporters.

Echoing Zelenskyy’s plea, Michel said that “a global response” was needed to end the siege and reopen export links.

Dodging the blockade

The EU has proposed that food could be exported out of Ukraine “by taking the overland route”, Politico said. The bloc plans to “significantly increase” the quantity of food that the “agricultural heavyweight” can deliver to nations “via EU roads and railways”.

EU Farm Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski told the news site that it was “necessary to organise alternative corridors for export, especially for wheat, corn, because Ukraine has a lot of stocks”. The “main solution” was corridors to Poland’s Baltic Sea ports, he said.

In a “stark warning”, Wojciechowski outlined how a blockade could allow Russia to “steal Ukraine’s share of the global market for commodities like corn and wheat”, while attempting to “whitewash its image as a charitable provider to poor countries”, the news site reported.

“This is Russian propaganda,” the commissioner said. “They are intentionally destroying Ukrainian [agricultural] potential… and the next steps will be that they are friends of the world and they portray themselves as the saviour.”

The Ukraine invasion also threatens to exacerbate global food shortages.

Russia is “wheezing under Western sanctions” and is “finding it difficult to operate as an exporter”, said The Times’ diplomatic editor Roger Boyes.

Moscow is struggling to “resupply its garrison in Syria”, he wrote. But if Ukraine is unable to “penetrate the Putin blockade,” the rest of the world could also face “a critical food shortage that drives some regions to the brink of famine”.

Global crisis

Whether Russia is able to ramp up its naval assault on Ukraine from the Black Sea will depend on the Montreux Convention, a 1936 treaty that “regulates maritime traffic through the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits”, The Economist said.

Both of these straits, which provide a link between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, are controlled by Turkey, which in late February “applied Montreux rules to prevent Russia from sending new warships into the Black Sea”.

The move “was thought to be largely symbolic,” given that “Russia already seemed to have enough ships in the sea to overwhelm Ukraine’s defences”, the paper reported. But in the light of the stalled invasion, “Turkey’s move appears to have had a decisive impact”.

As the battle to claim the Donbas region continues, Kyiv will have to pray that Istanbul continues to enforce the Montreux rules, effectively stalling Russia’s naval power. But in the meantime, “the West must break the Black Sea blockade”, said The Times’ Boyes.

Russia and Ukraine together “account for 30% of global wheat exports”, he continued, so a blockage of Kyiv’s key export threatens to trigger “higher food prices around the world”. The UN World Food Programme has already warned that the world has not faced a humanitarian situation of such severity since the Second World War.

The UK and its allies “should consider” and respond to Zelenskyy’s call for help to break the Black Sea blockage, Boyes added.

Anything less, he warned, will hand Vladimir Putin the power to “threaten millions with starvation”.