Sloph on Ukraine’s threat to bar the Black Sea Fleet from returning to Sevastopol.
Obviously the dithering is over, Ukraine has told Russia it’s not allowed to bring its navy back to Sevastopol so clearly theyve dispatched some/all the fleet. Is Russia going to take on Ukraine as well? Having said that, I don’t know how you go about stopping a fleet of warships parking wherever the hell they want to.
Background: Khrushchev gave the Crimea to his native Ukraine in 1954. Its population is overwhelming Russian and Tatar; neither have much love for Ukraine, and Crimea was the site of anti-NATO protests as recently as July.
Russia’s lease expires in 2017, and Ukrainian President Yuschenko has repeatedly made noise about terminating the agreement. As Halyna Pastushuk of Polish Radio reported in late July:
Viktor Yushchenko believes that negotiations must begin already today because the whole procedure means withdrawal of hundreds of vessels, huge infrastructure, naval infantry and air bases. Not long ago, Foreign Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Ohryzko said a necessary bill is already prepared to terminate the existing agreement about the presence of Russian fleet in Crimea. According to the Minister, the bill will be submitted to Verkhovna Rada. But already now the bulk of political analysts are saying that in Verkhovna Rada which, actually, does not have proper majority, this bill may be blocked during voting. Meanwhile Moscow has sharply criticised the bill warning that such actions are premature and hamper constructive negotiations between the two sides in this and other questions. Sergey Markov, Director of Moscow-based Institute for Politics, in his interview for Radio BBC said there can be no talking about fleet withdrawal:
‘The talk is not about the commencing negotiaions about withdrawal, the talk is about the prolongation of the term for presence of Russian fleet in Crimea. We are basing our position on the fact that the majority of Ukrainians are for Russian fleet remaining in Crimea, while Ukrainian polititians that do not reflect the will of the nation but are controlled by outer influences, have to leave the political arena.’
So Yuschenko and his allies may see this as something of an opportunity to forward their Sevastopol agenda. I don’t mean to imply that Kyev’s statements are insincere–the massive display of Russian force in Georgia must be worrying for its pro-Western regime with its own aspirations to join NATO–but merely to point out that there are more layers at work here.
CNN has a very blog-like overview of recent developments. So I’ll just link to that.
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
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