Ukraine’s naval strategy — opinion

Geographically and historically, Ukraine is a maritime power, and now it needs to become one in fact. Our national security depends on it

Simple things are not always obvious. But the [sustained] missile strikes on Odesa, the closure of the grain corridor, and the battles for Mariupol before that boil a complex picture down to things that are both simple and obvious. One of them is the fact that Ukraine is a maritime power. And it should build its strategy accordingly.

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To begin with, let us note that all the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the United Kingdom) are maritime powers. Spain and Portugal, Turkey and Russia are also maritime countries, and in the past, it looked like they could become world leaders. However, they lacked what the G-7 countries have: political and economic freedoms, without which free scientific research and technical innovation are impossible. But without the G7 countries' access to the sea or the ocean, their prosperity would hardly have happened.

Maritime trade has played a key role in world history. Just one example: what I am writing now, and you are reading in letters, not cuneiform or hieroglyphics. This trade was very profitable in the past, but also very dangerous. As the ancient Greeks used to say, the distance between life and death is measured by the thickness of a ship's plank. Since ships with their goods could fall victim to the elements, pirates, or fraud, it was necessary to keep accurate records of what was sent and what arrived at the destination. Keeping records – who paid whom and what and how much they owed – is much easier if you don't need to know hundreds of hieroglyphs or cuneiform signs, but only 22 letters. It is easier to write down the name of any exotic product or an unusual name of a merchant or captain. The advantage of alphabetic writing was that Phoenician and Greek traders could keep these records themselves, rather than depending on the services of a hired scribe, in much the same way that with the advent of computers, business owners can type letters themselves rather than relying on assistants with typewriters.

In the ancient world, the division between civilized and barbaric peoples was also a division between those peoples who had access to the sea and those who were geographically deprived of it. The modern globalized world emerged from Columbus' discovery of America. He went there in search of a sea route to India, because the land routes were blocked by Muslim rulers.

A black open field

In Ukrainian history, the maritime factor was one of the key ones. Suffice it to say that Athenian democracy was largely based on grain from the Black Sea steppes; the first cities on Ukrainian lands were Greek colonies; the first state on Ukrainian lands, ancient Rus, emerged because Scandinavian detachments established the "from the Varangians to the Greeks" trade route; Zaporizhzhya Cossacks were known and appreciated in Europe primarily because of their sea campaigns and raids on the Turkish coast. In the end, according to military leadership expert chaplain Andriy Zelinsky, the ideological transformation of the modern Ukrainian army on the basis of Western values began with the restructuring of the marines.

However, just as the brightest moments of Ukrainian history are associated with the access of Ukrainian lands to the sea, so too were its darkest moments the result of a lack of control over the sea coast. Like Europe and India, Ukraine was cut off from the rich Mediterranean market by the Muslim world for a long time. Therefore, the local grain trade had to reorient itself to the distant Baltic Sea. The Muslim world's control over maritime trade also depleted Ukrainian lands in another way. According to the Turkish historian Galil Inalcik, the number of Slavic slaves transported across the Black Sea between 1500 and 1700 exceeded the number of black slaves transported across the Atlantic over the same period.

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The Russian Empire solved this problem by annexing the Black Sea coastal steppes. According to the plans of the Russian emperors, these lands were to become a new Greece (the restored Byzantine Empire) or later a new Russia. In reality, they became a new Ukraine. This happened primarily thanks to the Ukrainian peasantry, which colonized these steppes to satisfy their "land hunger." By the end of the nineteenth century, the Ukrainian population dominated the entire territory of the former untamed steppe. The second reason is that the newly annexed lands turned out to be the territory of an unprecedented social experiment – the territory of free (without serfdom) economic initiative. This was more in keeping with the spirit of a free and prosperous Ukraine than with the atmosphere of a distant and cold imperial center.

This experiment also attracted masses of foreigners from outside the Russian Empire. Thanks to this, the Black Sea steppes became one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse regions. Unlike Western Europe, where the boundaries between different ethnic groups had been established since the Middle Ages, the borders here were fluid and blurred at least until the First World War.

Historians argue that there are few regions in the world where imperial and nation-building projects have faced such severe problems. For example, the impossibility of drawing clear dividing lines where an empire ends and a nation begins. Accordingly, the construction of one empire or nation was by definition the destruction of another.

The Black Sea steppes remained a problem for every state that tried to establish its control here – for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, as well as for the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Independent Ukraine has inherited this problem. There is, however, a significant difference between modern Ukraine on one hand, and Russian imperial projects on the other. In independent Ukraine, different ethnic or religious groups could treat each other differently. But there were no pogroms, mass repressions, or deportations. If there were conflicts in Ukraine, they tended to be resolved peacefully. Quarrels ended mostly in compromises, often questionable, but effective. The collapse of the "Russian Spring" in 2014 is proof of this. Putin's hopes that the Russian army's invasion of Crimea would lead to a civil war in southern and eastern Ukraine were dashed. It is safe to say that if it were not for the terrorist Igor Girkin, the situation in Donbas would not have ended in a military conflict.

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When the war is over and the archives are opened, historians will be able to find out exactly when Putin finalized his military plans for Ukraine. Right now, we can say with a high degree of certainty that it happened immediately after the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. But if we talk about general plans, the roots go back to Putin's visit to Ukraine in 2001. According to his then-advisor and now-opponent Andrei Illarionov, it was then that, under the influence of what he saw in Kyiv and Crimea, Putin's plans to "return his younger sister" to the bosom of the "Russian family" crystallized in his mind. The main bonus was to be full control over the Black Sea coast, including the key port of Odesa. Compared to this, the Donbas annexed by Russia was "peanuts."

I realize that many readers already knew these facts. But it's not about the facts, it's about the need to link them into a logical thread and draw the appropriate conclusion.

Paradox and strategy

The conclusion was that throughout its history, Ukraine had a rather weak perception of itself as a maritime power. The main Ukrainian texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came from the realm of literature and literary criticism, and this literary vision was limited mainly to the old, "continental" Ukraine. Kyiv, Lviv, Poltava, and Kharkiv appeared there much more often than Odesa, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Mariupol. It is unfair to reproach the authors for their oversight. They wrote about the areas where the main intellectual battles took place. But the fact remains that there are very few texts that deal with the Black Sea Doctrine.

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On the other hand, the ruling elite of independent Ukraine, with a few exceptions (such as Volodymyr Horbulin), did not write texts and it is not known whether they even read them. It had its own interests, which can be described as a struggle for power for the sake of redistribution of financial flows. The war has changed this. For the first time, the government began to work for national interests – how to survive, withstand, and win this war. As a result, society has begun to trust the government, for the first time throughout the entire history of Ukrainian independence. We have an obvious paradox: the government needed a war to gain public trust.

But the government is dealing with immediate needs. Strategic needs are postponed until later. I am not writing this out of my own imagination, but under the impression of conversations with good friends of mine who have served or are serving in the navy and marines. By the nature of their work, they had to interact closely with U.S. and UK experts. The latter pointed out the lack of a wise Ukrainian maritime strategy and an appropriate sequence of actions. Their thesis and warning: "You can win the war on land but lose the war at sea."

To understand this need, it is worth paying attention to another paradox: the marines in Ukraine are used as the most combat-ready, but still land-based force. In the U.S. and UK cases, it is used for its intended purpose – for military operations on water – primarily to protect, with the support of naval forces, the coastline, islands and peninsulas, trade routes and all critical naval infrastructure.

In academic terms, the difference between these two ways of thinking is called a paradigm shift. The shift from one to the other paradigm is often not voluntary, but rather forced by circumstances.

Ukraine has an official naval strategy. It is called the Strategy of the Naval Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine 2035. It was developed and adopted at the end of 2018. The problem, however, is that it is not being implemented. I cannot guess why.

But in general, today it seems that there is no specific vision of how we should act at sea to protect our strategic interests, including freedom of trade, food security, and global industrial security. And it is a pity. Because looking ahead, Ukraine is unlikely to achieve sustainable peace and development without wisely building its own naval capabilities. On our way to NATO, we have the opportunity to take advantage of the maritime security experience that has been accumulated over the centuries by allied countries, primarily the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Norway, and France.

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Geographically and historically, Ukraine is a maritime power, and now it needs to become one in fact. Our national security depends on it. We, the citizens of Ukraine, must realize this. And not only to realize it ourselves, but also to raise the level of public consciousness. This activity is more useful and necessary than our Facebook quarrels.

Let's learn more about our history, learn from our own and others' mistakes, join forces with the best to learn how we, as a maritime power, can defend our interests for the sake of our well-being – no matter how near or far it may look to us now – and the well-being of our children and grandchildren.

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