The Kremlin’s grey-zone war in the Black Sea shows its real intent

The Bald Man has not moved for more than three years. She arrived to take on a cargo of sunflower oil on the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Along with 28 other foreign-owned vessels, she has been trapped in the port of Mykolaiv, some 60km from the front line, ever since.

The ship’s fate shows the difficulty of doing business with Vladimir Putin. The White House said last month that both sides had agreed to ensure safe navigation and to eschew the use of force in the Black Sea. But Russian officials then said there would be a maritime ceasefire only after their country had got relief from some sanctions. Ukraine in turn demanded that Russian naval vessels stay out of the western part of the sea. The result has left Ukrainian officials baffled. No Ukrainian port facilities have been hit since then, but attacks on the cities in which they are located have continued.

From July 2022 for a year there was an agreement for Ukraine to resume grain exports. It covered the port of Odessa and the neighbouring ones of Chornomorsk and Pivdenny . Three weeks after Russia terminated the deal in 2023, Ukraine opened a new corridor for commercial ships. Ukraine’s tiny navy had, with the use of home-made and Western missiles, driven Russia’s fleet out of the western side of the Black Sea. Today, says Dmytro Pletenchuk, the Ukrainian navy’s spokesman, the sea is a military “grey zone”. Apart from patrol boats, neither navy risks sailing. There is a stand-off, but no ceasefire.

Marine-traffic websites show virtually no civilian shipping either in Ukrainian waters or in the bit of the Sea of Azov the Russians have seized. In fact transponders are turned off for security: plenty of freight is still moving. According to Yuriy Vaskov, who helped negotiate the 2022 grain agreement, Odessa and two neighbouring ports are working at 60% capacity despite war damage. During last year’s harvest their grain-export terminals were operating at 90%. They could be even busier this year.

Last year 4,651 commercial ships arrived in Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and 4,410 left, reckons the navy. But insurance and logistics costs are far higher than in peacetime. In 2024 Ukraine’s agricultural exports were $24.5bn, or 59% of total exports. Ships hug the coastline on their way to the Bosporus and out to the world.

Though Odessa is now functioning fairly normally, one of the biggest losers from the war has been Mykolaiv, once a grain-export hub. Its exports have been diverted to the three ports of the Odessa region. According to Oleksandr Kubrakov, a former minister of infrastructure, “more than 50% of revenue of the city” of Mykolaiv came from companies linked to the port. Vitalii Kim, head of the regional military administration, says that some 10,000 people used to work in and around it. Russia wants to trade the reopening of Mykolaiv “for something bigger”, he says, but he recognises that Ukraine’s security priorities are “higher than our interests”.

Mykolaiv is where the Russian invasion of southern Ukraine was halted in 2022. It lies on the banks of the Southern Bug river. Downstream it joins the Dnieper to form an estuary bounded at its mouth by the sandy and strategic Kinburn Spit. At Ochakiv, where the estuary meets the sea, the spit can be seen 4km away across the water. It is occupied by the Russians. An island midway is held by Ukrainian troops. Any ship sailing to or from Mykolaiv and Kherson must pass by.

In 2014 Ukraine lost Crimea and its naval facilities. In 2017 American troops began building a hub in Ochakiv for the Ukrainian navy. In 2021 Britain pledged to help develop a naval base there. Three days before the full-scale invasion Mr Putin claimed that what the Americans had built there enabled NATO to threaten the Russian navy. Ochakiv came under attack from Russia as soon as the invasion began.

Same old protagonists

The area has been fought over for centuries. In 1855 an Anglo-French force defeated Russian troops on the spit in the Crimean war. In 1856 the British planned to seize Mykolaiv but the war ended before they could do so. Today Ochakiv exemplifies the ambiguity and opportunism of Mr Putin’s concept of a ceasefire, whereby he intends not to end hostilities but to create perpetual instability. Ochakiv is under constant attack from Russian troops on the spit. Half of its pre-invasion population of 15,000 has fled. A plume of smoke rises on the spit where the mayor says Ukrainian troops have hit a Russian target.

When the full-scale invasion began in 2022 Ukraine deployed barges to close the estuary to Russian ships. No one knows how many mines now infest these waters, as many more were flushed down the Dnieper when Russia destroyed the Kakhovka dam in 2023. Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium have given Ukraine five minesweepers, but the Montreux Convention, which governs transit through the Bosporus, prohibits them from entering the Black Sea in time of war.

On April 15th and 16th Turkey hosted talks with Ukraine, France and Britain about a deployment to keep the peace in the Black Sea if a deal is ever reached. Hanna Shelest, an analyst based in Odessa, says she doubts Russia would honour any agreement. Instead of peace, what Mr Putin wants is a fluid, dangerous eternal conflict in which no one is secure. Just look at his grey-zone war in the Black Sea.