-Sea of Azov with Crimea at 7:00-8:00. At Kerch (6:00) passage onward to Black Sea and Mediterranean is possible.
11-26-18 Crisis began earlier on Sunday after Russia stopped three Ukrainian ships from entering the Sea of Azov via the Kerch Strait by placing a cargo ship beneath a Russian-controlled bridge.
The Ukrainian navy said on social media that two Ukrainian sailors had been wounded in the subsequent seizure of its ships and that the alleged Russian attack on them had occurred after they had retreated and headed back towards Odessa, the Black Sea port from where they had begun their journey. “After leaving the 12-mile zone, the Russian Federation’s FSB [security service] opened fire at the flotilla belonging to . . . the armed forces of Ukraine,” it said.
With officials from both countries accusing the other of provocative behaviour and relations still raw after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and its backing for a pro-Moscow insurgency in eastern Ukraine, the incident risks pushing the two countries towards a wider conflict.
Earlier on Sunday Russia’s border guard service had accused Ukraine of not informing it in advance of the ships’ journey, something Kiev denied, and said the Ukrainian ships had been manoeuvring dangerously and ignoring its instructions with the aim of stirring up tensions.
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11-26-2018 Tensions in the Sea of Azov have been simmering for months and this weekend its waters came to the boil. Russian ships opened fire at three Ukrainian naval vessels Sunday after they attempted to enter the sea. Ukrainian media reported that 23 crew members were detained, including six who were injured, and the vessels seized.
Kiev's navy is hugely outgunned and outnumbered by Moscow. Ukraine responded by putting its forces on high alert. Some Western experts say the Kremlin's tactics in the Sea of Azov are straight out of the Kremlin playbook.
Analysts have been warning for months that the Azov, which is just under half the size of Lake Superior, is the latest example of Russia carrying out "creeping annexation" — where borders are subtly shifted to take territory, or in this case waters, from former Soviet allies.
The sea is technically shared by Ukraine and Russia as part of a 2003 agreement. That was before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, a move denounced by the U.S. and its European allies as an illegal occupation. This gave Moscow control of the Kerch Strait, the only maritime entrance into the Sea of Azov, which it literally cemented by opening a huge, low-lying bridge in May. Ukraine lost many of its naval ships when Crimea was annexed.
Ukraine has accused Russia of using this chokepoint to delay and block shipping. It also says Russia has been building up its naval presence there. Russia has countered by saying their actions are permitted under the terms of the 2003 treaty. The Kremlin says any additional ships its brought into the region are only there to guard the new bridge against attacks.
Cutting off Ukraine’s access to these waters would isolate half of the country's coastline, including the economically important port city of Mariupol, and effectively turn the Sea of Azov into a Russian-controlled lake.
"Russia sees the Sea of Azov as an area where it can impose huge pressure on Ukraine," said Michael Carpenter, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon.
Maxim Tucker, an expert on Ukraine with the Open Society Foundations, said the Sea of Azov incident represents a "dramatic" escalation. "It is the first time the Russian military has openly fired on the Ukrainian military and claimed responsibility for it," he told NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-creeping-annexation-hits-ukraine-sea-azov-n939981
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10-19-18 In recent months tensions have ratcheted up between Russia and Ukraine over Moscow’s grip on the Kerch Strait, a passage that connects Ukraine’s ports to the Black Sea. Russia has delayed the transit of hundreds of commercial ships bound for Ukraine, which some security analysts say has put a strain on the country’s struggling economy. https://www.stripes.com/news/us/russia-warns-sea-of-azov-off-limits-to-us-nato-ship-drills-1.552511
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-Russian Caspian Flotilla
5-31-18 On the one hand, the Moscow-backed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) two years ago had asked Russia to send ships to the Sea of Azov to supplement its own naval forces (Ostrov, February 29, 2016) in order to seize more of the Ukrainian coastline; but at that time it had been turned down flat. Something apparently changed in the Kremlin’s calculus at present....
In the last two weeks of May Moscow has quietly shifted five naval vessels from the Caspian Flotilla to the Sea of Azov, a move the Russian authorities have cast as a step needed to defend against a Ukrainian attack on occupied Crimea. But both rising tensions with Kyiv over shipping in the sea and through the Kerch Strait as well as the nature of the Russian ships that were redeployed instead suggest that this move is intended to give Moscow a new offensive capability. https://jamestown.org/program/moscow-shifts-flotilla-from-caspian-to-azov-sea-giving-it-a-new-offensive-capability/
Russian freighter blocks entry to Sea of Azov
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