Russia Deploys Warships to Black Sea in Dangerous Escalation Near Ukraine

Russia deployed more than 20 warships into the Black Sea on Wednesday, representing a troubling new source of potential military escalation at a time of already heightened tensions with Ukraine and its Western backers.

Russia’s Black Sea Fleet reported the naval strike group deployment Wednesday morning, saying it represented pre-planned exercises and involved patrol ships, frigates, missile ships, landing ships, minesweepers and anti-submarine ships. Russian state news service Tass reported the ships’ crews will “conduct training on safe maneuvering in areas with intensive navigation, organizing communications and organizing air defense at sea,” according to a translation.

Moscow did not specify where the ships would operate. However, they departed from strategic bases at Novorossiysk as well as Sevastopol – the strategic port on the Crimean Peninsula that Russia forcibly annexed in 2014 – which together straddle the Kerch Strait, a key choke point to critical ports in Ukraine that Moscow has previously exploited to exert pressure on Kyiv.

And it comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin has raised alarm in the West with other military deployments around Ukraine, including more than 100,000 soldiers to its western border, to Crimea and to Belarus, another former Soviet ally.

“We can't view this event in isolation. When viewed in combination with everything else, it's obviously quite concerning,” says Colin Clarke, senior research fellow at private intelligence firm The Soufan Center.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry and the U.S. Navy’s 6th Fleet, responsible for operations in the region, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Putin has frequently employed supposed military exercises as a pretext for actual troop deployments – a practice common in the months-long standoff with Ukraine. Some of the first Russian forces to enter Belarus, for example, were paratroopers whose presence first became known when the Kremlin acknowledged two had died in a training accident there.

Russia has also deployed so-called advisers to Belarus to see how NATO countries have responded to the Kremlin’s moves.

In total, Putin appears to be preparing for war while maintaining plausible deniability in claiming the deployments only represent exercises.

“At this point, Moscow has the initiative and is positioning its forces in a deliberate manner, waiting to see how NATO reacts. To use a cliche, this is definitely a chess match, and Putin seems content to make his moves very slowly and in a calculating manner,” Clarke says. “While this is happening, he's monitoring the public divisions between members of the NATO alliance, which is likely influencing his decision-making calculus.”

Other analysts have warned in recent days that the Russian military would soon turn its attention to the sea. Bill Schneider, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote in an analysis note this week that Russia’s troop buildup is “now nearing completion as six amphibious assault ships may be headed for the Black Sea from their Baltic naval bases.”

The latest naval deployments are particularly troubling given Russia’s history of using that domain to exert unique pressure on Ukraine and its key port of Mariupol, which can only access the outside world via the Kerch Strait and Black Sea.

Twice in 2017, Russia shut off access to the Kerch Strait, which connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, and its ships blocked ports in the Ukrainian towns of Berdyansk and Mariupol. The economic disruptions cost Ukraine as much as $40 million each year, according to an analysis by private intelligence firm Stratfor.

The next year, a dispute over shipping lanes there threatened to dramatically escalate the ongoing, simmering conflict between Ukraine and Russia into outright war. Russian border guards detained Ukrainian fishing vessels in the Sea of Azov, and Putin slammed Kyiv for detaining Russian commercial ships also in the Azov in what he described as "a totally illegal move" and which Kremlin officials warned may prompt retaliation.

Ukraine’s defense minister at the time called Russia’s moves “a very deliberate attempt to raise the stakes.”

Russia has since accused Ukraine of several similar provocations since then, including in December during a tense encounter between the two countries’ warships.