Daniel S. Hamilton and Angela Stent
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and other neighbors is transforming the Black Sea into Eurasia’s strategic frontier. Russia has disrupted flows of energy, food, and other commodities; generated millions of migrants; and heightened insecurity not just in Ukraine but also across the entire Black Sea region. These efforts constitute part of a much longer and larger strategy. Russia does not merely seek to dominate Ukraine. It wants to render each of the other five states that border the Black Sea—as well as Moldova, which borders Romania and Ukraine and whose waters flow into the sea—subservient to its interests so that it can exercise veto power over choices these countries make. Moscow also aspires to use the Black Sea as a platform from which to project power and influence throughout the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the Caucasus.
Russia’s quest to become the dominant force in the Black Sea is an essential element in its strategy to reassert itself as a great power. The Kremlin believes that a failure to establish a commanding presence in the region would leave Russia exposed to Western encroachment, render it less able to influence adjoining areas and disrupt commodity exports that are critical to the Russian economy. Turkey poses the greatest obstacle to Russian objectives in the region because it is the only Black Sea state that Russia has not historically dominated and it is a NATO member. But even after the end of the Cold War, the Kremlin retained considerable levers of influence over the former Soviet empire’s Black Sea space in Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine.
In recent decades, Russia has sought to further subordinate these states to Moscow through a combination of persuasion and coercion. Increasing Russia’s Black Sea presence is also at the heart of President Vladimir Putin’s decades-long plan to resurrect the country’s maritime power. He prioritized modernizing the Black Sea Fleet, whose interventions proved critical in supporting Russia’s Mediterranean Squadron and its 2015 intervention in Syria. Putin has ignored internationally recognized borders to seize a great expanse of Black Sea coastline, including Georgia’s territory of Abkhazia in 2008, Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014, and the Ukrainian part of the Sea of Azov coast in 2022. Although Ukraine has prevented Russia from taking all of its Black Sea coast, Moscow has deployed naval mines as well as blockaded and bombed Ukrainian ports to sever Ukraine’s sea access and minimize the presence of other navies.
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