From The Hoover Institution's quarterly journal The Caravan, March 7:
The Black Sea
Thirty years from now, a historian writing a book on the events of the last two decades happening in the area between Russia and the Middle East, including in Ukraine, might entitle it The Long War for the Black Sea.
Thirty years from now, a historian writing a book on the events of the last two decades happening in the area between Russia and the Middle East, including in Ukraine, might entitle it The Long War for the Black Sea. For in fact, while the military clash between Russia and Ukraine is occurring predominantly on land and the outcome of the war will determine the political and economic survival of an independent Kyiv, the great strategic prize is the Black Sea. To control Ukraine means to dominate the Black Sea and to control the Black Sea means to control the internal sea of Central Europe and the Caucasus.
Nevertheless, military operations on the Black Sea appear like a sideshow of the primary battlefield on the Ukrainian steppes. With the exception of a few events, visually dramatic, and reputationally shocking for Russia, (e.g., the sinking of Russia’s Moskva by two Ukrainian Neptune missiles in April, the Ukrainian retaking of the geographically strategic Snake Island, an attack by unmanned surface vessels on Russian ships in Sevastopol in October), the decisive actions in this current war between Russia and Ukraine are along the Dnieper, in eastern Ukraine, and to some degree over Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure. The Black Sea is not a major theater of operations also because Ukraine has no naval assets and a very limited ability to fly or sail over it.
In fact, the Black Sea seems more of a venue for cooperation than competition. The so-called “grain deal” is the main fruit. A series of parallel agreements, negotiated under the UN but signed in Istanbul, allows Ukraine to export grain while also granting Russia the right to do the same and send to the world markets its own foodstuffs, oil, and fertilizer, blunting Western sanctions.
But this impression that the Black Sea is a secondary theater – or even one that is a source of cooperation – is mistaken. It is not a military battlefield between Russia and Ukraine. It is, however, a geopolitical chessboard where mainly Russia and Turkey vie for control.
On the Black Sea, the United States is not the primary actor. This sea has never been at the center of American attention which has been focused rather on the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean and Baltic seas (and from a global perspective, increasingly drawn to the Pacific). Not surprisingly, the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy doesn’t mention the Black Sea; neither did the 2017 Trump document. And while over the years some have raised the issue of the Black Sea as pivotal, there is no coherent strategy on how to deal with it. Recently, Senators Romney and Shaheen have passed a bill requiring the Biden administration to develop a Black Sea strategy, the lack of which is seen as an intellectual weakness rather than as a symptom of an objective absence of interest and inability to exercise influence.
This strategic void goes back to the Montreaux Convention of 1936 which imposed limits on the size and length of stay of ships of non-littoral states in the Black Sea. As a result, NATO vessels (except those, like Turkey and Romania, with a coast on the sea) have limited ability to patrol this body of water. No NATO ship traversed these waters before February 2022 and once Turkey closed the straits to non-littoral ships at the beginning of the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been no possibility of introducing one there. In brief, the Black Sea is, indeed, a sideshow for the Western alliance and the U.S. in particular.
Yet it is an internal sea in the region and consequently it controls the littoral lands around it. In fact, it is hard to understand the geopolitics of Central Europe, Caucasus, the Mediterranean and the Middle East without looking at the Black Sea.
For Russia, the Black Sea is crucial to access the Mediterranean and to exercise influence over the Danubian region. Unsurprisingly, the foreign policy objective of Russia is – as it has been for centuries – to rule the Black Sea. The Ottoman empire controlled it until the 17th century, when Russian southward expansion challenged and ultimately replaced the domination of the Turks and the Poles. The Russian Black Sea fleet was created in 1783 and since then, with some ups and downs, the sea was essentially a Russian, and then Soviet, sea....
....MUCH MORE
Ummmm...Ahhhh....*****....Leaving aside the whole Constantinople in 1453 thing and the Gates of Vienna in 1683, I have to think the Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Cossacks and a whole bunch of other folks might have some thoughts on the issue of colonialism....
And, just a couple weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine:
I should probably do a separate post on the slave raids the Crimean Khanate conducted in eastern Europe (and the Barbary corsairs up to Iceland, 1624!) but the short version is that 15 years after the Muslim Turks invaded and conquered the Christians of Constantinople in 1453, the Khanate began slave raids they called ‘harvesting of the steppe', making huge bank by sending the slaves across the Black Sea to the newly renamed Istanbul:
The Turks especially like blonde women but were quite enthusiastic about buying brunettes and redheads as well. Somewhere in the neighborhood of three million people were enslaved and let's just say this history engendered a lot of bad blood. The last harvest of the steppe was in 1769 when about 20,000 people were enslaved, to be sold in Crimea and resold in Istanbul.
As noted over the years:
... And back to the Cossacks. A couple weeks ago we posted "Little Has Changed Between Turkey, Russia Despite Reconciliation" with this introduction:
Whenever I think about Turkish-Russian relations I think of this painting:
... That's "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks" by Repin, hanging in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
As the story goes, in 1676 the Turkish Sultan, despite being beaten by the Cossacks when he tried to invade what is now southern Ukraine, demanded these guys surrender and submit to Turkish rule.
As can be seen, the Cossacks thought this was the funniest thing they had ever heard and wrote a letter in response.
A very profane, very defiant, very vulgar, very contemptuous letter.
These old boys just cracked themselves up with their letter.
And that's what I think of when I think of Russians and Turks.
If interested, chapter 16 of THE TRAVELS OF PERO TAFUR (1435-1439) has his account of a visit to the already established pre-1453 slave market in Caffa (Feodosia) Crimea (also home of the European branch of the black plague). And:
