FactualA pivotal place between areas of Russian and European influence, the Black Sea has once again become the scene of dangerous demonstrations of force between Moscow and NATO since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, February 24. Thirty years ago, the end of the Cold War gave hope for a transformation of these strategic waters into an area of peaceful cooperation.
A place of trade since Antiquity, the Black Sea – like the Mediterranean before it – has tended to become a natural border for the European Union (EU) since the beginning of the 21st century.and century. It is bordered by two States, Romania and Bulgaria, which became members of the Union in 2007. With Turkey, itself a candidate for European membership since 1987, NATO thus has three States on the shores of this highly strategic maritime space.
For the EU, it is above all a place of transit for its energy supplies from Russia and the Caucasus, and often via Turkey. The Black Sea thus represents – after the Mediterranean and the Baltic – the third sea of interest for the EU. For Russian power, it constitutes an access, considered essential, to the “warm seas” – as opposed to the Arctic and Baltic coasts – of the South, where the war in Syria, which began in 2011, provided it with the opportunity to strengthen military strongpoints in the Syrian ports of Tartous and Latakia. As part of this strategic opening, the Crimean peninsula, a kind of advanced bridge dominating the Pontic basin, annexed by Moscow in 2014, has always occupied a central place.
The strategic stake of Crimea
The conquest of the Crimean Khanate by Tsarina Catherine II in the 18th centuryand century marked a strategic turning point in the expansion of the Russian Empire, with the inauguration of the Sevastopol naval base in 1783.
Ukraine, which had declared its independence in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, saw most of its territory forcibly integrated into the Soviet Union, created in 1922. After years of turmoil and clashes during which French and British briefly occupied Odessa and Sevastopol in 1919, the Soviet “empire” thus managed to preserve wide access to the Black Sea.
During the Cold War, the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies (1955) controlled all of the shores of the Black Sea, which became “Sovietized”, with the exception of Turkey, which joined the Atlantic Alliance in 1952. The annexation of the Crimean Oblast to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 had only symbolic significance. Against the backdrop of massive deportations of Ukrainians, this territorial transfer was simply intended to mark the 300and anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Pereïaslav, which had brought Ukraine (then controlled by the Zaporozhian Cossacks) under the suzerainty of the Tsar of Russia. It is also for Nikita Khrushchev (1954-1963) a way of showing his attachment to Ukraine, where he was appointed leader of the Communist Party in 1938, and where he built his political career. At the time, no one imagined that the administrative boundaries within the Soviet Union could one day become international borders, placing Crimea de facto under the sovereignty of Kiev, in contradiction with the strategic interests of Russia.
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