On its watery surface \u2014 where it’s very hard to see your reflection because the water is so dark \u2014 across its roughly 500,000 square kilometers, in its indecision between being a sea and a lake, the Black Sea is writing the story of the future of an alliance as heavily armed and as delicate as NATO. On the shores of the Black Sea, different worlds sit side by side; its waters hold together six countries, some bound by shared aspirations, so much so that the history of its coastlines is a history of ambitions and of routes carrying people from one world to another. But since 2022, the Black Sea has stopped uniting and has been transformed, by Russia’s will, into a sea of war. Three NATO members border its waters \u2014 Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey; two countries that want to join and feel very European \u2014 Ukraine and Georgia; and finally the bully of the Black Sea, Russia. Its waters tell a story of coexistence turned into conflict, and today the Black Sea is another of the world’s flashpoints where Moscow and NATO face off \u2014 and where Russia, thanks to Ukraine, has suffered a deeply humiliating defeat. The sea is shaping our Alliance, which this month will hold one of its most complicated summits, in Ankara, with Donald Trump having already said he’s attending only for his friend Recep Tayyip Erdogan \u2014 not to strengthen NATO.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Turkish pressure<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n The Trump administration wants to override the decision of Democratic congressman Gregory Meeks, who is blocking a proposed $750 million sale of aircraft engines to Turkey. Meeks is concerned about the relationship between Ankara and Vladimir Putin, given that Turkey has a Russian air defense system, the S-400, purchased about a decade ago. Under normal procedure, military sales of this kind \u2014 in this case F110 jet engines made in America, intended for Turkey’s Kaan fighter jets and already used on its F-16 fleet \u2014 require congressional approval, but under Trump the rules are being trampled, all the more so with a meeting looming between the American president and the Turkish president, who is hosting the NATO summit. The concerns are well founded, which is also why Turkey’s purchase of F-35 fighters has repeatedly been postponed. Erdogan commands NATO’s second-largest army and plays an increasingly important role in the many disputes between the Trump administration and its European allies \u2014 not least because Turkey’s defense industry has grown considerably in recent years, Ankara has supplied weapons to Ukraine, and during the war against Iran, NATO air defenses intercepted and shot down Iranian ballistic missiles aimed at Turkey. But weighing on the wavering trust in Erdogan is his 2017 purchase of the S-400 system, which triggered sanctions from Washington and Turkey’s expulsion from the F-35 sales program. Erdogan is pressing Trump to be readmitted to the program, and Trump is tempted, but American officials have set conditions \u2014 chiefly, giving up the notorious Russian S-400 system \u2014 because they fear that this system, among the most advanced in Russia’s arsenal, could gather data on the F-35. The integration of the Russian system into NATO air defenses, along with the potential presence of Russian personnel, is a major concern for Europeans too, who see the engine sale as a crack in the American ban on F-35s: if you listen to America’s chatty (and often reckless) ambassador Tom Barrack, those fears can only grow.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Russian incursions<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n At the end of May, a Russian drone crashed into a building in Galati, a city in southeastern Romania. The Romanian government had ordered its fighter jets to intercept the drone, which had crossed the border from Ukraine, but they failed to do so: the roof of the residential building caught fire and several people were injured. Mark Rutte, NATO’s genial secretary general, busy with his permanent mission of praising Trump in hopes of keeping him from bolting the Alliance, said: “Russia’s reckless behavior is a danger to all of us.” Putin questioned whether the drone was actually Russian and asked Romania to hand over the wreckage so Moscow could conduct its own investigation. But a wounded Romania rejected the Kremlin’s lies: “Full responsibility lies with the Russian Federation, whose conduct demonstrates total disregard for international law and for the safety of the citizens of a NATO member state,” Romanian president Nicusor Dan wrote on X. Solidarity came immediately from Bulgaria, which underscored the constant Russian threat to NATO countries, particularly those bordering the Black Sea. In early June, two cargo ships \u2014 one flying the flag of Saint Kitts and Nevis, the other of Panama \u2014 sailing through the “grain corridor,” the Black Sea channel used by ships carrying goods that are supposed to be protected, were attacked by Russian drones. Yet another ship, Turkish-owned but flying a Panamanian flag, was also hit: its onboard cook, an Egyptian national, was killed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The sunken fleet<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n When Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was given three tasks: to provide cover for ground operations, to gain control of the Black Sea, and to lead an amphibious landing operation near Odessa. None of these objectives was achieved \u2014 and it wasn’t Ukrainian warships that stood in the way, since, as is well known, Ukraine didn’t have any. The Russian fleet wasn’t technologically advanced, but no one had worried about that, because in Moscow everyone was convinced the Ukraine question would be settled within days. The illusion evaporated almost immediately in the waters of the Black Sea: the Moskva, the eleven-thousand-ton cruiser that symbolized Russian power \u2014 which less than two months earlier had struck Snake Island and demanded the Ukrainians’ surrender, only to be answered over the radio with “go f— yourself” \u2014 was sunk on April 14, 2022, by two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles. That October, two Ukrainian Mykola-3 drones struck a frigate, a minesweeper and another vessel moored in the port of Sevastopol, Crimea. From that point on, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet became the target of numerous Ukrainian attacks, and even though the wreckage of the weapons used has helped Russian forces in their large-scale copying of Ukrainian technological innovations, today Russia’s fleet in Europe’s sea at war has practically ceased to exist. Many military experts say the Kremlin hasn’t learned the lesson, and that the powerful Baltic Fleet suffers from the same arrogance and the same backwardness: in effect, the Russians can now count only on their submarines.<\/p>\n The Black Sea is extremely low in oxygen; its anoxic environment allows for the near-perfect preservation of the wrecks that settle on its seabed. It is a natural museum, one that safeguards and remembers. Georgia, too, borders the Black Sea \u2014 indeed, part of its coastline is occupied by Moscow. Georgia has watched happen on its own territory what Russia later did in Ukraine as well, and it has always nurtured European and Atlanticist ambitions. Today Georgia is being increasingly suffocated, yet it continues to protest with courage, in demonstrations crushed with ever-greater violence by a government that has taken notes from the Kremlin. Still, the story of Tbilisi’s Europeanism endures: it looks out at the Black Sea and feels its calling toward those waters that preserve everything \u2014 and that today tell a story: Ukraine is winning, and in its victory it is carrying us all along with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On its watery surface \u2014 where it’s very hard to see your reflection because the water is so dark \u2014 across its roughly 500,000 square kilometers, in its indecision between being a sea and a lake, the Black Sea is writing the story of the future of an alliance as heavily armed and as delicate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":7743,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7694"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7791,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7694\/revisions\/7791"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}