Gunboat diplomacy in the Sea of Azov

If you are an authoritarian leader such as Vladimir Putin, this is the perfect moment for a little gunboat diplomacy. The West is less focused on naval warfare than on navel-gazing. America is preoccupied with and polarised by its President. It anyway sees China, not Russia, as its main strategic rival. Europe is divided and easily overruled: Britain is Brexit-bound, France paralysed by “yellow-vest” strikes, Germany angst-ridden and domesticated as far as the Kremlin is concerned by reliance on the Nordstream pipeline project for its energy.

So the naval incident in the Kerch straits was a textbook example of gunboat diplomacy. Ukraine is vulnerable to Russian pressure for all kinds of reasons and its trade route to the Sea of Azov is its weakest spot. The capture of three small naval vessels is no great loss in itself, but hugely significant in a strategic sense.

For commerce, the threat of naval interception is now simply not worth risking. The cost of insurance alone will become unsustainable. At a stroke, Putin has cut off one of Kiev’s lifelines.

The naval imbalance between Russia and Ukraine is vast, even though the Black Sea fleet is usually smaller than Russia’s Northern, Baltic and Pacific fleets. So there is not much that Kiev can do to deter Moscow from denying its warships access to the Sea of Azov. The latter is now in effect a Russian lake, as was always likely ever since the occupation of Crimea four years ago.

We in the West are unaccustomed to think in naval terms. Europeans take US supremacy at sea for granted, just as they did that of the Royal Navy during the centuries when Britannia ruled the waves. But we are foolish to forget that the freedom of the oceans has been hard-fought.

Exactly a century ago last week, as it happens, the German High Seas Fleet was interned at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, bringing to an end the last serious challenge to Anglo-American naval supremacy in the Atlantic. In the Second World War the Germans concentrated on U-boat warfare: a deadly threat but ultimately defeated by Allied control of the air and surface. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 seriously threatened US domination of the Pacific, but only briefly. Six months later, at the Battle of Midway, the Japanese advance across the ocean was stopped in its tracks, with the loss of four irreplaceable aircraft carriers.

Ever since that era, the aircraft carrier has been the capital ship and the US Navy, which has 11 of them, unrivalled. Now, however, US supremacy is being challenged again by the Chinese naval build-up — news of the construction of a fourth new aircraft carrier, of comparable size and capabilities to the American carriers, has just emerged. The two new Royal Navy carriers have been much criticised on grounds of cost, but they will mean that Britain is the only European power apart from Russia to possess an oceangoing naval capability over the coming decades.

Russia, meanwhile, has its own huge programme of naval shipbuilding. Significantly, however, it is focused on submarine warfare. The Russians are therefore following in the footsteps of the Germans rather than the Japanese in their efforts to rival Anglo-Saxon naval hegemony. Submarines can more easily pass unnoticed from one ocean to another, underneath the polar ice cap if necessary, and thereby obviate what has always been Russia’s weakness: the geographical necessity of dividing its forces between four different fleets. It was this problem that cost Tsar Nicholas II the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, when the much smaller but better trained Japanese fleet defeated the Russians twice: first the Pacific fleet and then, after a journey lasting many months, the Baltic Fleet. Putin is not going to allow himself to share the fate of the Tsar, whose prestige never recovered from this humiliation.

Ukraine’s President Porochenko has appealed for the West to send warships to the Black Sea in order to demonstrate to the Russians that the Sea of Azov, with its two important Ukrainian ports, remains open to international trade. Nato has a moral duty to preserve the freedom of the high seas, but European leaders are unwilling to spend political capital on defending Ukraine, despite the fact that this large and strategically important country already enjoys a close relationship with the EU that is very similar to the deal that Brussels has just offered Britain.

The truth is that Ukraine is not trusted by everyone in the West, even though President Trump went beyond his Nato allies in offering support and warning Putin that his “provocation” would not be tolerated. The UK and the rest of the EU have been slow to react, even though Putin’s aggressive rhetoric, accusing Porochenko of staging the whole incident to boost his own popularity ahead of elections next year, shows that he is not going to back down easily. Indeed, it seems at least possible that Putin will go much further, with the ominous announcement that Russia is stationing yet more SS 400 missiles in Crimea.

In response, Porochenko has imposed martial law on Ukraine, which means that any Russian entering the country will be presumed to be engaged in espionage, sabotage or subversion. Ukraine already has a bad reputation for corruption and this further erosion of the rule of law is unwelcome unless it is strictly time-limited and martial law is lifted as soon as the crisis abates. The idealism of the 2014 Maidan Square protests, which brought down the pro-Russian president Yanukovych, now seems a long time ago. But Ukraine still matters just as much as it did when Nato and the EU failed to prevent Putin from occupying Crimea and destabilising the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine.

The clash in the Sea of Azov may seem remote: an obscure confrontation in a far away land of which we know little. To allow this perception to determine the West’s strategic and diplomatic response would be a grave miscalculation, with potentially disastrous consequences for us as well as for Ukraine. At stake is Odessa: pearl of the Black Sea, “southern capital” in Tsarist times, the creation of a largely Jewish bourgeoisie during the late flowering of imperial Russia. It is unthinkable that this great city could become a battleground again. Yet that could happen quite easily if Europe turns its back on the Atlantic alliance with foolish fantasies of a “European army”. The only thing standing between Putin and the prize of Odessa is Nato.