Strait of Hormuz-style crisis looms for Russia as Ukraine forces shutdown of a key waterway

Russia’s grip on the gateway to the Black Sea is shifting after a series of Ukrainian attacks forced Moscow this week to suspend traffic on the key waterway, restricting the Kremlin’s ability to trade with the rest of the world.

This development marks a major reversal of Russia’s fortunes, as the Sea of ​​Azov has been out of Kiev’s reach for years, providing Russia with a convenient base for attacks on Ukraine and connecting large regions of Russia’s south to the world’s oceans.

But recent developments Ukraine’s drone program we changed this. Ukraine’s drone commander Robert Brovdi said on Wednesday that Kiev had shot down 116 Russian ships in the Sea of ​​Azov in the past nine days alone; a sharp increase.

Previously, attacks on Russian ships were mostly limited to the shadow fleet and military ships. CNN cannot independently verify Brovdi’s claim, but videos of some of the recent attacks shared by Ukrainian officials show direct hits.

The brutal attacks forced Russia to suspend traffic by closing two crossing points at the corners of the Sea of ​​Azov: the Don-Azov Canal, which connects the sea to inland waterways, and the Kerch Strait, which connects it to the Black Sea.

Satellite images and ship tracking services show long queues of ships waiting on both sides of the sea.

Ukraine is becoming increasingly successful in targeting Russia’s shadow fleet The number of oil tankers carrying sanctioned fuel could be increased, but the blockade of the Sea of ​​Azov could have a wider impact, including on non-sanctioned exports such as wheat or sunflower oil.

The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based conflict monitor, said Tuesday that Ukraine’s attacks in the Sea of ​​Azov “represent a new phase in Ukraine’s efforts to wage war.” Isolate occupied Crimea “To remove it from the Russian logistics network and block Russian seaborne shipping routes, especially for oil products and grain.”

Major Evhen Karas, Commander of the 413th Separate Unmanned Systems Regiment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who participated in the operation, said that Russia has turned Crimea into a large military base with power supply units trying to advance towards Ukraine.

“We are cutting all the logistics,” Karas told CNN, adding that Ukraine’s ability to launch more attacks at lower costs “has become a problem that the Russians cannot solve.”

“We will increase this pressure as much as we can, this is just the beginning,” he said.

Russia is the world’s largest grain exporter, accounting for approximately one-fifth of global wheat exports, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service.

About a quarter of Russia’s wheat exports are sent via the Sea of ​​Azov, according to Andrey Sizov, a leading Black Sea agricultural market analyst.

“The Black Sea for (the) wheat market is similar to what the Persian Gulf means for the crude market. (The) Black Sea is by far the biggest supplier of wheat to the global market,” he said, adding that if the situation continues, Russia’s economic losses could climb into billions of dollars.

Wheat futures prices, an important indicator of traders’ expectations, have risen in recent days, partly due to the Sea of ​​Azov crisis. Russia claims it can bypass the Sea of ​​Azov and reroute all grain exports through other terminals on the Black Sea; but Sizov said this would not be possible during the peak season, when Russia’s total grain exports far exceed the capacity of these ports.

Russia, which regularly targets Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, has accused Kiev of terrorism and launched attacks on the southern Ukrainian port of Odessa and other targets in the region.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday that Kiev’s operation in the Sea of ​​Azov was “even beyond piracy.”

“Pirates at least commit robbery and keep the loot for themselves. However, the situation here is ‘neither for themselves nor for others’; the aim is only to harm and intimidate. This is terrorism,” he said.

Ukraine maintained that it deliberately hit only military targets.

Ukraine’s campaign in the Sea of ​​Azov began as an effort to isolate Crimea, the southern Ukrainian peninsula that has been illegally annexed by Russia since 2014. Russian-appointed officials declared a state of emergency in Crimea last month after Ukrainian attacks on the peninsula led to widespread power outages and fuel shortages.

Kiev then stepped up attacks on bridges, highways and railways to deprive Russia of the ability to transport goods and people across a “land bridge” connecting Crimea to Russia via occupied southern Ukraine. It also targets Russian ships trying to carry fuel to the peninsula.

The dream of Peter the Great

The Sea of ​​Azov is an inland sea located between the southern coasts of Ukraine and Russia and is a kind of annex of the larger Black Sea.

Following Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, Moscow and Kiev reached an agreement on sharing the waterway in 2003. However, the Kremlin has repeatedly broken this agreement after the war first broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and the illegal annexation of Crimea.

Russia, which launched a large-scale invasion in February 2022, managed to occupy the entire Ukrainian territory surrounding the Sea of ​​Azov and blocked Kiev’s access to them. Russian President Vladimir Putin even claimed that the sea is Russia’s inland waterway.

Although relatively small and shallow, the Sea of ​​Azov plays a vital role in the Russian economy. It is an important link of an extensive system of inland rivers and canals that transport oil, grain, vegetable products, steel and other goods from large areas of southern Russia to the Black Sea and from there to the world.

The network was built during the Soviet period, but the first attempts to connect the important waterway date back to the reign of Peter the Great at the end of the 17th century.

After launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia seized control of the Sea of ​​Azov and used the waterway as a staging area for attacks on key Ukrainian ports of Mariupol, Melitopol and Berdyansk.

CNN’s Victoria Butenko, Katharina Krebs, Luke Unger and Clare Sebastian contributed to this report.

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