Ukraine will seek to close the transit of Russian warships in the Bosporus Strait due to Russia’s attack and seizure of three Ukrainian military vessels in the Black Sea on Nov. 25, according to Ukrainian top navy commander Admiral Ihor Voronchenko.
Such an option is envisaged by the 1936 Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits, the senior officer said at the International Maritime Security Conference 2018 in Kyiv on Nov. 29.
“I express confidence that global community will eventually take the decision and admit that there was an aggression against Ukraine,” Voronchenko said.
“So, in compliance with the Montreux convention, specifically with its paragraph 19, we will try and ask Turkey to close the Bosporus to let the Russian know how it is like to violate international law.”
The Montreux Convention was signed in 1936 by a number of maritime nations including Turkey, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, Greece, Bulgaria, Australia, Japan, Romania, and Yugoslavia to introduce new regulation to the passage of civilian and military vessels the Bosporus and the Dardanelles during both peacetime and wartime.
The treaty restored the full control of Turkey over the strategically important straits connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, the sovereignty of which the country lost following the defeat at World War I.
But at the same time, it also introduced a number of specific conditions for shipping traffic in the area.
In particular, all non-military vessels from all nations are allowed to pass the straits unhampered in both wartime and peacetime.
For naval ships, there is a special transit regime.
In peacetime, all warships belonging to nations watered by the Black Sea (nowadays those are Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Romania, and Bulgaria) are free to navigate the straits after notifying Turkey shortly in advance. All other powers, however, are limited in this aspect: a single warship of a non-Black Sea nation must not exceed 15,000 tons in tonnage, and an aggregate tonnage of all non-Black Sea warships in the Black Sea must be no more than 30,000 tons (or 45,000 tons under special conditions), and they can navigate the Black Sea for no more than 21 days.
The treaty also says that only Black Sea powers can transit capital ships and submarines in the area.
The paragraph 19 mentioned by Admiral Voronchenko particularly states that in during wartime “in cases of assistance rendered to a state victim of aggression in virtue of a treaty of mutual assistance binding Turkey.”
The commander also added that prior to the Nov. 25 incident in the Kerch Strait, he had a conversation regarding this term of the 1936 treaty.
“In September, at NATO (Allied Joint Force Command) in Naples, I asked the Turkish navy commander if they would close the Bosporus to an aggressor state. The commander replied: “We will meet the conditions of the convention.”
The Ukrainian officer, however, made a supposedly incorrect statement saying that the Montreux Convention “clearly says that if there is a war between two states and that one of them are an aggressor, the Bosporus gets automatically closed for vessels sailing under its flag.”
Besides, Turkey so far does not have a binding treaty on rendering assistance to Ukraine in case of aggression against it.
Earlier on Nov. 29, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey was reported to have discussed with Russian leader Vladimir Putin a possibility of Turkish mediation between Russia and Ukraine over the tension in the Black Sea.
Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko on Nov. 29 in its interview with German media outlet Bild said that in the wake of the new wave of Russia’s aggression, he hoped that NATO member states were ready to deploy their warships to the Azov Sea and support Ukraine.
