(CNN) — Russia’s grip on its gateway to the Black Sea is slipping after a series of Ukrainian attacks forced Moscow to suspend traffic through the key waterway this week, limiting the Kremlin’s ability to trade with the rest of the world.
The development marks a major reversal of fortunes for Russia as the Azov Sea was for years out of Kyiv’s reach, providing Russia with a convenient staging ground for attacks against Ukraine and linking vast swaths of southern Russia with the world’s oceans.
But recent advances in Ukraine’s drone program have changed this. Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, said on Wednesday that Kyiv had hit 116 Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov in just the past nine days – a sharp increase.
Previously, strikes against Russian ships were mostly limited to the shadow fleet and military vessels. CNN cannot independently verify Brovdi’s claim, but videos of some of the recent strikes shared by Ukrainian officials show direct hits.
The relentless attacks have forced Russia to suspend traffic through the Azov Sea by shutting down the two chokepoints in its corners: the Don-Azov Channel, which connects the sea to inland waterways, and the Kerch Strait, which links it to the Black Sea.
Satellite images and vessel-tracking services show long queues of ships waiting on both sides of the sea.
Ukraine has been increasingly successful in targeting Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers carrying sanctioned fuel, but blockading the Sea of Azov could have a wider impact, including on exports that have not been subject to sanctions, like wheat or sunflower oil.
The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based conflict monitor, said on Tuesday that the Ukrainian strikes in the Sea of Azov “represent a new phase in Ukraine’s efforts to isolate occupied Crimea from the Russian logistics network and to disrupt Russian seaborne shipping routes, especially for petroleum products and grain.”
Major Evhen Karas, the commander of the 413th Separate Regiment of Unmanned Systems of Ukrainian Armed Forces, a unit that is participating in the operation, said that Russia has turned Crimea into one big military base with units supplying forces that are trying to push further into Ukraine.
“We are cutting all the logistics,” Karas told CNN, saying that Ukraine’s ability to strike further at lower costs “has become a problem the Russians can’t solve.”
“We’ll increase this pressure for as deep as we can reach … this is just the beginning,” he said.
Russia is the world’s largest grain exporter, accounting for about one fifth of global wheat exports, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service.
About a quarter of Russia’s wheat exports is shipped through the Sea of Azov, according to Andrey Sizov, a leading Black Sea agricultural markets analyst.
“The Black Sea for (the) wheat market is similar to what the Persian Gulf means for the crude market. (The) Black Sea is by far the biggest supplier of wheat to the global market,” he said, adding that if the situation continues, Russia’s economic losses could climb into billions of dollars.
Prices of wheat futures, a key indicator of traders’ expectations, have jumped in recent days, partly because of the Azov Sea crisis. Russia claims it can bypass the Sea of Azov and reroute all of its grain exports via other terminals in the Black Sea, but Sizov said this would not be possible during the peak season when Russia’s total grain exports far exceed the capacity of those ports.
Russia, which has regularly targeted Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, has accused Kyiv of terrorism and launched strikes against the southern Ukrainian port of Odesa and other targets in the region.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday that Kyiv’s campaign in the Azov Sea was “beyond even piracy.”
“Pirates at least rob and keep the loot for themselves. But here, it is a case of ‘neither for themselves nor for others’ – the goal is simply to cause damage and intimidate. It is terrorism,” he said.
Ukraine has maintained that it was intentionally striking only military targets.
The Ukrainian campaign in the Sea of Azov started as an effort to isolate Crimea, the southern Ukrainian peninsula that has been illegally annexed by Russia since 2014. Russian-installed authorities declared a state of emergency in Crimea last month after Ukrainian strikes on the peninsula lead to widespread power outages and fuel shortages.
Kyiv then stepped up strikes against bridges, highways and railroads to deprive Russia of the ability to transport goods and people through a “land bridge” that connects Crimea to Russia via occupied southern Ukraine. At the same time, it has also been targeting Russian vessels attempting to carry fuel to the peninsula.
Peter the Great’s dream
The Sea of Azov is an inland sea that sits between the southern shores of Ukraine and Russia, a kind of an appendix to the bigger Black Sea.
After Ukraine became independent from the Soviet Union, Moscow and Kyiv struck an agreement in 2003 to share the waterway. But the Kremlin repeatedly broke that deal after the war first started in eastern Ukraine in 2014, when it illegally annexed Crimea.
After launching the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia managed to occupy all of the Ukrainian land that surrounds the Sea of Azov, preventing Kyiv from accessing it. Russian President Vladimir Putin even claimed the sea was an internal Russian waterway.
While relatively small and shallow, the Sea of Azov plays a vital role in the Russian economy. It is a key link in a broad system of inland rivers and canals that transport oil, grain, vegetable products, steel and other commodities from large swaths of southern Russia into the Black Sea and then further into the world.
The network was built during Soviet times, but the first attempts to connect the key waterway date back to the reign of Peter the Great, at the end of the 17th century.
Russia seized control of the Sea of Azov after launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, using the waterway as the staging ground for attacks against key Ukrainian ports of Mariupol, Melitopol and Berdyansk.
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