Some will argue that a defensive effort to protect civilian vessels from an unprovoked Russian attack is tantamount to Western intervention. Ignore them.
In a stark warning following Russia’s decision last month to suspend its participation in a deal that allowed Ukraine to export grain via its Black Sea ports, the White House said that Moscow was laying the groundwork to take military action against commercial targets. “We believe that this is a coordinated effort to justify any attacks against civilian ships in the Black Sea and lay blame on Ukraine for these attacks,” said National Security Council spokesman Adam Hodge. The escalation Hodge described could be just around the corner.
Over the weekend, a Russian warship underscored its threat to ships that try to break Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports by firing small-arms ordnance over the bow of a cargo ship bound for the Ukrainian city of Izmail. According to the crew of the Turkish-owned vessel, the Russian forces who boarded their boat inspected the crew’s documents and passports and forced the captain to sign a document certifying that “no injury or damage” occurred as a result of their incursion. The ship was scheduled to transport agricultural products from Ukraine to a Romanian port ahead of distribution, but the cargo never reached its intended destination.
“I guess we are the first,” said one unnamed official with the Turkish shipping firm, “but I foresee these types of things becoming more common.” That is likely the message Russia hopes to send. The episode narrowly avoids international-incident status because the Turkish vessel flew under Palau’s flag in an effort to evade Russian restrictions on NATO-aligned commercial traffic operating in international waters in the Black Sea region. But given Russia’s increasing risk tolerance, the anti-ship mines it has sown in the Black Sea, and now its apparent willingness to fire live rounds at foreign naval traffic, a more dangerous incident may be inevitable.
It is important at this stage to strike down the false equivalencies and catastrophism that overtake the Western commentariat whenever Russia makes any sudden movements. The party that is guilty of escalation here is the one that fired live rounds at a commercial ship attempting to export grain to the rest of the world, not the NATO-aligned nation that commercial enterprise calls home. There is no legal rationale for Russia’s actions — naval blockades violate peacetime tenets of international maritime law, and no declared state of war between Kyiv and Moscow exists. Nor is it necessarily the case that a global conflagration would sequentially follow a more dangerous interaction between a commercial vessel and a Russian naval asset.
If Russia attacked a NATO-flagged vessel, the allied nation could invoke Article 4 of the NATO charter, which triggers consultations with fellow member states. Article 4 is a necessary precursor to triggering the alliance’s mutual-defense provisions in Article 5, but its invocation is not an invariable prelude to hostilities. Turkey invoked Article 4 in 2012, after Russian forces shot down a Turkish jet over Syrian territory, and in 2020, when at least 34 Turkish soldiers were killed during a skirmish with Syrian government forces supported by Russian air power. The NATO alliance was not dragged formally into Turkey’s conflicts after either incident, even though Ankara responded to the latter attack by mounting a major Turkish counteroffensive against Syrian government forces.
If Turkey or any other NATO-member government sought similar consultations over a direct attack on an allied vessel by Russian forces, it would likely produce a similar response from the alliance. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that Brussels wouldn’t respond at all to a Russian provocation along those lines.
The alliance could step up patrols of the Black Sea with its own naval assets to deter future acts of Russian aggression. Indeed, the alliance should proactively provide for the security of its merchant vessels if only to raise the stakes of Russian aggression and therefore prevent provocative episodes like the one that occurred this weekend. “The rationale for the escorts would essentially fall under the broad provisions of international law that permit enforcing the freedom of international waters and also allow the protection of humanitarian shipping in conflict zones,” wrote retired Admiral James Stavridis last month.
There will be those in the West who insist that a fundamentally defensive effort to protect civilian vessels from an unprovoked attack by Russian forces is tantamount to Western intervention in Vladimir Putin’s war. Those same voices will maintain that the West has no fundamental interest in protecting the international grain trade from becoming hostage to Moscow in its war of conquest, and the Atlantic Alliance should allow itself to be extorted into docility lest it invite the Kremlin’s wrath. Those voices deserve to be studiously ignored, as all efforts to invert the offensive and defensive roles in this conflict deserve to be.
If followed, their recommendations would ratify the wisdom of Moscow’s recklessness and invite future acts of piracy and brinkmanship in the Black Sea and elsewhere. If, however, Russia becomes convinced that it can intimidate Ukraine’s commercial partners into observing an illegal blockade, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that this would constitute the most significant victory Russia has yet enjoyed in Ukraine. And all for the low, low cost of a handful of bullets.