Reflecting on One Year of War: The Decisive Element of Black Sea Strategy​

The MOC
(Left to right) HMS Defender, USS Laboon, and HMNLS Evertsen in the Black Sea, June 2021. Photo By Dan Rosenbaum/Royal Navy.

By Carsten Schmiedl

The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) emphasizes the pacing threat presented by China without neglecting the acute threat presented by the Kremlin. In practice, however, scarce resources impel difficult choices — particularly amidst uncertainty about the duration of Putin’s war and Beijing’s intentions in Taiwan. To successfully implement the NDS, the West should increasingly concentrate resources where tests of Alliance resolve are likeliest, beginning with reasserting NATO’s maritime presence in the Black Sea.

The strategic significance of the Black Sea region derives from enduring geopolitical factors — the interplay of resource abundance and rivalry, intensified by geography — which are primarily shaped by sea power. The Peloponnesian War ended with the naval battles of Arginusae and Aegospotami in 405 BC, which decisively stymied Athenian grain imports via the Hellespont. Crimea was the locus of the Greek and Genoese trading empires almost one thousand years apart. In 1783, Catherine the Great annexed Crimea for military-strategic, economic, and purportedly cultural reasons. Hitler and Stalin’s primary objective in the Second World War was arguably conquering Ukraine to resource their empires. Russian and Ukrainian exports through the Black Sea accounted for 30% of wheat, 75% of sunflower oil, and 20% of maze traded worldwide before February 2022, and were the impetus behind the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

This is no coincidence. The Black Sea’s unique geography — a ‘lake’ pierced by the strategic Crimean peninsula, which controls access to the Sea of Azov, with only the Bosporus Strait as a ‘pressure value’ — engenders a cauldron of competition. The Kremlin’s access to the Black Sea enables power projection and its warm-water ports reside exclusively on Black Sea coastline. This makes control over littoral territory central to Putin’s imperialist ambitions, and has led to attempts by the Kremlin to assert dominance and undermine regional stability and Western presence through so-called frozen conflicts, starting in Moldova in 1992 and continuing with the invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. The Kremlin is now attempting to stifle Ukraine’s will and strangle its economy from the sea, where 121 ships containing agricultural exports currently await transit. In short, the story of Black Sea security — in which Putin is merely the newest instigator — revolves around an enduring struggle for maritime supremacy.

Yet Western strategy has failed to adapt, despite a favorable military balance vis-à-vis Russia. Since the Kremlin’s illegal and illegitimate invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, NATO has retroactively increased Black Sea maritime presence — albeit inconsistently — rather than proactively developing a strategy to enforce freedom-of-navigation. U.S. warships patrolled the Black Sea for 210 days in 2014, 58 days in 2016, and 182 days in 2021; French and Greek vessels made three visits and one German warship patrolled for 11 days in 2020. The U.S. reportedly cancelled participation in Sea Breeze 2022, an annual maritime exercise in the Black Sea with nine NATO members, in light of Putin’s war. NATO’s Standing Maritime Groups provide multinational crisis response but not permanent presence. The Alliance’s Maritime Strategy was referenced in NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept but last updated in 2011.

In retrospect, the costs of deprioritizing the region — an error of omission signaled to the Kremlin through insufficient capability and commitment — are now self-evident: the West helped create the conditions for Putin’s full-scale invasion as well as Russian maritime and amphibious operations in its initial stages. Moreover, while Western security assistance to Ukraine is intensifying, the Alliance continues to focus almost exclusively on Ukraine’s land and air capabilities rather than enforcing freedom-of-navigation to liberate the Ukrainian economy.

To support Ukraine in the near-term and successfully implement the NDS in the long-term, the West urgently needs to develop a comprehensive maritime-driven Black Sea strategy that prioritizes naval presence and enforcing freedom-of-navigation — or it will almost certainly be pulled back to the Black Sea region by necessity. The U.S., in consultation with NATO Allies, should build on the momentum from the Black Sea Security Act, introduced in U.S. Congress by Senator Shaheen in 2022, to develop “a regular, rotational maritime presence in the Black Sea.” European and North American Allies should commit to providing national or multinational presence 365 days per year over a multiyear period to minimize deviations in presence and opportunities to deprioritize the region.

As Western security assistance continues to flow to the region, NATO’s littoral members — Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey — should lead an Alliance-wide assessment of maritime capability requirements to complement the increase in naval presence. This should include consultations with Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine and could be part of updating NATO’s Maritime Strategy and to align capabilities and production capacity with commitments defined in Brussels and national capitals. It should also consider intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance — such as drones, which are becoming increasingly cheap and lethal — to develop more effective early warnings and threat monitoring.

And a more regular and robust regimen of multinational maritime exercises, perhaps modeled on the scope and frequency of DEFENDER, would encourage more comprehensive and realistic tests of the Alliance’s regional maritime crisis response. Such exercises would also help prepare NATO forces to surge quickly in peacetime and pre-crisis or crisis scenarios.

The combination of increased presence, tailored capabilities, and more robust exercises would strengthen regional deterrence and help demonstrate to Russia the West’s capacity to administer force — and impress upon the Kremlin that Western apathy towards the Black Sea region was an aberration, even amidst growing threats to peace and stability beyond the Euro-Atlantic region.

 

Carsten Schmiedl is a NATO 2030 Global Fellow. He was previously advisor to the 2020 NATO Reflection Group and a security policy analyst at think-tanks in the United States and Europe.


The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.