00:00:00 [Intro Music starts and fades out]
00:00:12 Kelly O'Neill
Welcome back to the MapMaker podcast.
I’m your host, Kelly O'Neill.
In this episode, I sit down with Anastasiia Pereverten and Markus Vaher to discuss their recent research into the contemporary situation in the Black Sea. If you are wondering how the Russian-Ukrainian War is impacting the surrounding region and how experts go about the work of analyzing events on the ground – and under water – this episode is for you.
00:00:42 [Transition music starts and fades out]
00:00:49 Kelly O'Neill
So we are here to talk about research and to talk about the Black Sea and to talk about security and to talk about how scholars think about all of these things and how you as graduate students are forced to wrestle with not only complex ideas and topics but also with other scholars - who can be just as difficult to work with and just as inspiring to work with as the printed texts and digital material and other sources that you use for your research. So, I'm really excited to kind of hear what you discovered and what you have to share with us. But I thought I might start by just asking you both to introduce yourselves. Tell us who you are.
00:01:31 Anastasiia Pereverten
OK, I'm Ana Pereverten. I'm a first-year master’s student at the REECA program and I'm mostly studying US foreign policy towards Eastern Europe. But I'm also studying Turkish, which I think is another connection to the Black Sea that I have.
00:01:46 Markus Vaher
And I'm Marcus Vaher, originally from Estonia. I'm also in the REECA program at the Davis Center. My main research concentrates on Russia and Belarus and resistance to authoritarianism. But for this project, I was looking at Black Sea from a international law angle and a security angle.
00:02:12 Kelly O'Neill
So, before we get into those angles, could you just explain to me how you both ended up in the REECA program?
00:02:21 Anastasiia Pereverten
Yeah. So, I'm from Ukraine mostly before coming to the US, I worked in cultural sphere in Ukraine and I had this idea that I would like to do cultural diplomacy in the future. I studied cultural studies in Ukraine. I came to the University of Wyoming on the exchange program, and I studied International Studies, which is like an intersection of cultural studies and IR. There, I worked at think tanks and after the start of the full-scale invasion, the vision kind of formed that I could not only do cultural diplomacy, but diplomacy in the wider sense of the word. And so, with the ambition to become Ukrainian diplomat, I applied to Harvard because Master’s degree is something that you need if you want to work in the foreign service.
00:03:05 Markus Vaher
And for me, I was studying in France during my undergraduate focusing on Middle Eastern politics. At some point I realized that my future will not be as related with the Middle East and then the full-scale invasion started, making it obvious that the existential threat for my home country, Estonia, is from the east and working on those issues seems the most important thing to do. So, that sort of made it obvious for me regarding my choice of a Master’s program. I did also mandatory military service in the Estonian Navy right before coming here. So for the Black Sea lab, I think that that's interesting. Right. Because I can sort of make this comparison between Baltic and Black Sea.
00:03:55 Kelly O'Neill
And do you have a sense at this point you both going through the undergraduate process, graduate training, do you have a sense of what kind of a thinker you are? What kind of a scholar you are? What kinds of questions grab you when you're reading something, when you're in a class, do you kind of, have a sense of where your mind goes and what kind of motivates you, and maybe what, you know, what doesn't? What kind of thinker do you feel like you are or might become?
00:04:20 Anastasiia Pereverten
What made me think about it the most was this semester I have experienced taking a graduate seminar here at Harvard in the government department. It was a seminar with only Ph.D. students in the government department. And it was a seminar in political psychology. It's a fascinating class, but one of the things that impressed me in the class is the level of abstraction that people engage with when thinking about all these issues in political psychology and international relations. And I, it made me realize that I don't enjoy as much the scholarly pursuit of formal theories. And the questions of “What are we going to do about it as private individuals or state statesmen?” interest me most.
00:04:57 Markus Vaher
Right. I think we're both pragmatics behind this table here. We've discussed this sort of outside of this conversation and I think for both of us why regional studies, right? Why not political science is exactly this. We care about that region specifically because of our personal connection, but also having done Middle Eastern studies I would say it gives so much more detail to the subject of, let's say, political science or the history of modernity. It's very different when you do it country by country, people by people, and I think I also drift towards that a lot.
00:05:33 Kelly O'Neill
So do you feel like when you're thinking about the region, we at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies are constantly laboring over what language we should use to describe the region, right? You would probably be shocked and horrified at how often faculty debate very vociferously about what words we should use and not use, and how many times we've reconsidered even what the Davis Center should be called. But it kind of gets at this larger question of what is this region, you know? What are its boundaries? What does it look like? You are both in certain ways from the region you're studying. If you encountered someone on the street and they asked you to explain the region, regional studies, like… What does it look like to you? Has your image of Russia, Eurasia, or other words of your choosing, has it changed over time? Does it look different to you now that you are in this program than it did when you were growing up or studying or having other professional experiences?
00:06:39 Anastasiia Pereverten
Yeah, I think in Ukraine, when I was a student, regional studies as such wasn't something that I thought about. My schooling was very, like, disciplinary, kind of like anthropology and history and culture, la, la, la. And then when I was considering Master’s program, I noticed how regional studies programs tend to be often named, like, Russian studies and something else. I never gravitated towards it because I personally don't study Russia, I know very little scholarly about that country. I obviously have some experiences with being in the media sphere of that country, in the media in the country, but I've always been saying Eastern Europe and Central Asia. If people ask me “what do you study?,” I say “I study Eastern Europe and Central Asia.”
00:07:22 Markus Vaher
I tend to think about it in more strictly non-political terms, if that is possible. So, the word Eurasia for example for me is strictly a geographical term, I don't label these different peoples together under the term of Eurasia because it associates with Eurasianism in my head. With these, like, early 20th century theories of how the Eurasian land mass is somehow also, like, socially significant or even superior, depending on who you read. And that's not only Russian authors, right, it's also English authors and so on. Regarding the language question, I don't really have strong linguistic, sort of, complexes. I'm from Estonia and of course I know quite well what Russian aggression has been in the past and what it could be in the future. But at the end of the day, you know, if I, let's say, get called up as a reservist I would have soldiers who are from Russian-speaking families in my unit. And, you know, they're from Russian-speaking families, but they're Estonian citizens. And I think the citizenship and the sort of civil commitment comes first and sort of ethnic, linguistic questions, I think, are not that important.
00:08:39 Kelly O'Neill
So, one of the reasons why regional thinking, regional studies is one thing, but regional thinking or structuring a research project with a region at its core, it's a complex kind of thing. It's a big ask to make of oneself because there are so many layers to unpack as you both just eloquently pointed out, political geographies are different than cultural geographies are different from economic geographies and the region that we kind of placed at the center of this conversation is the Black Sea region. Which is a very particular region, to my mind, in my reading. Because in some ways I think it's been kind of blindly accepted as a region, but it really has not been thought through very robustly from an academic perspective. Most people who live in the states that are littoral states - the six littoral states - you don't think of yourselves as part of the Black Sea region, right? There are other ways of identifying, you know, where your country belongs in the world. So, in a way, it's kind of a region without a region, a sea without a region. And yet, it all, there does seem to be some kind of justification for thinking about the region. But I think it's a question, right? An open question and a really interesting question to be thinking about. So, I'm really interested to see how your research and your, kind of, explorations of the topics that you chose, you know, whether it helps us come to some better understanding of whether or not there is such thing as a Black Sea region, right? Is that a meaningful term to even have on the table? I don't expect answers, but it's something that fascinates me.
00:10:16 Anastasiia Pereverten
Yeah. In my conversations, I think I mostly referred to when I said Black Sea region, I just meant all the countries that surround Black Sea and I just didn't want to list all of them. So it's a Black Sea region, but in my first conversation that I had with a political scientist, one of the things that we discussed and there was a position of that person that it's not really a region, it's like, it's a sea surrounded by multiple regions. There are countries that are in NATO and there is Russia and there's Türkiye. Yeah. And then there's Ukraine. And like all these countries have such different interests and pursuits in this sea. So, it's for some people, I guess, it's harder to conceptualize Black Sea as a region. But another thing is, when you're looking at organizations of regional cooperation, sometimes they're limited to the countries of the Black Sea. But then there is the initiative of the Three Seas when it's also Caspian and Baltic Sea. But then there's also Black Sea Economic Cooperation that includes way more countries than just the countries surrounding the sea directly, there is Albania, Serbia and Azerbaijan, like, a lot of other countries, so I struggle to answer that question. I guess my usage of the term was strictly to describe like Russia, Türkiye, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria, but others probably use it more widely.
00:11:32 Markus Vaher
My thinking about regions, I think, is very tight to this concept from post war historians in France at the Annales School, who had this idea that we should focus on also regions that don't necessarily seem similar. So, there are examples that they worked on. I think it was Braudel who worked on the Mediterranean mainly, sort of making that argument that this is a sort of common sea, right? And that Tunisia and Croatia in some sense are in the same community of sort, or at least in a cultural sort of context. I think the same applies probably to some extent to the Black Sea. The sea is the common element. You have common interests in there, for example for environmental protection, but also during the war. I would say like safety of navigation, for commercial shipping. So, you still have common issues and regardless of whether you are like in NATO or against NATO, you would want that seat to stay clear because all of you have very nice beach towns on it, let's say from pollution, right? The same way I think about, I'm trying to make this analogy in my head with the Baltic Sea, where for Baltic Sea littoral states very commonly refer back to, let's say, the Viking Age and the Hanseatic League, where you did have strong ties across the sea, they're still strong, but I guess at that time it was sort of exceptionally so. And then even, you know, social sort of cues in these different countries can sometimes be similar. For example, the dark humor on the islands in Estonia is similar to dark humour in Denmark. I don't know. I'm still testing it out. If this will also works for the Black Sea, right? What is that common element? Maybe it's not the humor, maybe it's something else.
00:13:11 Anastasiia Pereverten
I had not a scholarly, but I think an interesting experience here on campus as I'm taking Turkish class, My Turkish professor one time was, every once in a while we have a very international group in the classroom, she explains a word or like a term in Turkish. And then she goes around the classroom asking everyone to say how it would sound in their language. We have people who speak German and who have people who speak Polish, and I speak Ukrainian. And every time that Ukrainian and Turkish words sound Similarly, she goes “Black Sea, it's Black Sea. it's Black Sea connection.” [Kelly laughs] So, like, I mean, definitely cultural connections are there.
00:13:55 Kelly O'Neill
Mhm. It's a subtle form of post imperialism, right? I mean, the Ottoman legacy.
00:13:59 Anastasiia Pereverten
Yeah. No no, no, no, definitely, definitely. [Kelly laughs] But she recognizes the late, [Kelly: yeah] but she's not a scholar of coloniality in connection to Eastern Europe [Kelly: right]. She's scholar of literature, and she still establishes that connection in her head was the Black Sea.
00:14:14 Markus Vaher
Right. And the other layer before the Ottoman layer would be the Greek. [Anastasiia: yeah] So with Georgians, you know, referring to the Golden Fleece with, like, Greek sites in southern Ukraine, Greek minority as well.
00:14:27 Kelly O'Neill
All the layers are there [Anastasiia: mhm] and some of them have sunk into the sea and been beautifully preserved by the anoxic environment, so it's one of the best marine archaeological sites to work in which has nothing to do with the research that you did, but the sea is in a sense kind of a repository of even the ideas and the kind of exchanges that have been ongoing over the millennia. Whether or not it is, it really functions as a source of commonality is something we can think more about.
Last night I was looking at, and this is going to sound typical of me, [Anastasiia: mhm] I was looking at maps of the Black Sea and I was looking at 14th century maps made by various Italian portolan chart makers and the maps at the time were oriented so that you are looking south and so you have sea at the bottom of the map and the maps were large so you could actually walk all around them, but I was looking at one of the earliest maps. It was, I think, from 1320 of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and it's held at the French National Library. And it reminded me of a moment that I had a long time ago, having just read Braudel, which was a very formative moment in my graduate training and thinking about the Mediterranean, and then someone showed me a map of the Mediterranean upside down and it was kind of one of those mind-blowing moments that you get from Braudel that everything looks so different when you just change the orientation. And although that is something that I've shown to countless students in my years teaching, I had never done the same thing with the Black Sea, and I had never shifted the orientation of the maps of the Black Sea. And so, last night was actually this like 10:30 at night, sitting on my couch, staring at this map was really the first time that I had that experience of feeling this space suddenly become unfamiliar, familiar in a different way, but really unfamiliar in kind of the unsettling sense of a geography that you assume to be stable. But it can be made very unstable; a place that, yeah, again, it's just the sense of, “OK, what hangs together? What is at the core of this space?”
OK, let's talk about what particular topics you decided to dig into. Ana, do you want to start off?
00:16:47 Anastasiia Pereverten
Yeah, so initially my topics of interest were demining in the Black Sea; demining as in removal of explosive devices because often in conversations I would start asking people about demining and they're like, “well, mining of what?” And I was like, “well, not like mineral resources I meant like removal of explosive devices and the other topic was trade [clicking sound in the background], particularly Ukrainian trade. I kind of remembered, a number, 90% of Ukrainian agricultural export happened to the Black Sea, and specifically through the seven main ports. I knew that many of them were essentially blockaded or it was just made impossible to continue trade with the ports with Russian invasion. So, I had interest in those two topics, but I ended up having three incredible conversations that spanned across security, trade, not just Ukrainian trade, international trade in the Black Sea, dependency of the trade on Ukraine's military technology innovation and also the effects of war on marine ecology of the Black Sea and more generally, almost like an anthropological conversation on what mindset do States and states actors employ for that ecological damage to be enacted?
00:18:18 Kelly O'Neill
For those who can't rattle off the main Ukrainian ports, could you just remind people of what they are? Sure.
00:18:27 Anastasiia Pereverten
Sure. [Kelly laughs] So, historically it was Mykolaiv, it was Mariupol. It was Odesa and Pivdennyi, Chornomorsk, and Ismail. And interestingly, “Chornomorsk” means literally “of the Black Sea” and “Pivdennyi” means “southern.” So out of this ports, Mariupol was occupied in 2014 until 2015, and then was reoccupied in 2022.
Mykolaiv had to stop its operations too. Same was Kherson and Ismail. To this day its three main ports, in great Odesa area, meaning Odesa, Chernomorsk, and Pivdennyi. Those are the main three ports that Ukraine currently use for seaborne trade.
00:19:15 Kelly O'Neill
So, what's the right entry point into thinking you're you're talking, you have a kind of wide range of topics that obviously have connections moving through them. What was your starting point, kind of what was the place that you wanted to attack first?
00:19:28 Anastasiia Pereverten
In the study of Ukraine and trying to wrap your head around how war has affected Ukraine and Black Sea. One of the things that often troubles me is that people tend to focus on one problem when Ukraine, meaning both the state and the people who live there have to, like, tackle all the problems in the state at the same time. So, it's like, you can't trade, but you also have decreasing production levels. But you also need money to continue the fighting. And you also should, like, take care of the mines that are close to civilians because of the currents moving them closer to the coastline. And dolphins are also dying in the Black Sea. So, like, all the things happen really at the same time, and even when you're trying to look at the solutions, like, oh OK, we need an insurance system that would encourage private commercial shipping to still take place in the Black Sea because Ukraine really needs that. But it's hard to get an insurance company to come into your country during the wartime. So then it’s again on the state to come up with a solution that would still incentivize, cause you, you need the trade, and you need the companies to be there, but there is a war. So the war really penetrates every single sphere and creates this paradox where solutions become almost impossible because of how complicating the war is.
When it comes to transport, if you're looking at the Black Sea being mined, being dangerous and the risks in the Black Sea for the trade are high, you go “well, alternatively, we should use other means of transportation.” But Ukraine has the lowest index of connectivity to Europe among the Black Sea countries. And the railway system is monopolized by a single company. So how much a single company can do and railway system systems are also overwhelmed in 2022 by the flow of people who need to be evacuated. So there isn't really that much space to solve the problems that you have but you end up having to find those solutions somehow. So, my entry point was trying to gather the complexity of issues and ask my questions to the experts describing the complexity. So, I often went into the conversation saying “well, it's clear that we need demining training, but it's also clear that the US is withdrawing from the region. So, who's going to pay for the training now? It's clear that we need alternative transportation. But who's going to be building the transportation during the war?” That was my main angle.
00:22:04 Markus Vaher
My primary angle of approach was international law because I have taken a course this semester on international law of the sea, and so I was thinking, “OK, let's see what's going on in the Black Sea, what has happened there in the last, you know, 20 years and now in wartime, what are the sort of legal regimes governing, You know, everyday behavior for different countries on the Black Sea coast.” Similar sort of interest in the question of trade comes from there. How is shipping regulated right to these seven ports? What is Russia doing to either prevent or complicate that? The question of a blockade came up and there is, to my surprise, quite a lot of international law regarding sieges and blockades. This is all things that have to be sort of revived now, right? We haven't had war in Europe of this scale, you know, since the Second World War, during which a lot of those rules didn't even exist yet. Or if they did, they weren't often observed. And now we're facing those same questions again with little understanding of what can be done, I think.
00:23:16 Kelly O'Neill
So, could you maybe paint a little bit of a picture of the legal landscape across these countries? Are we talking… So, when we're, you know, international law and maybe its relationship with the national systems of law that are shaping and pushing and pulling against international legal interest, how does all of that work?
00:23:39 Markus Vaher
Right, so this is the, basically the first question I was asking from Professor James Kraska, who I was talking to and broadly speaking, there are two legal regimes that coexist in the Black Sea. You have standards of peacetime international law of the sea, which is mainly governed by the UN Convention for the Law of the Sea, and under that convention all of the countries on the Black Sea coast are state parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Except for Turkey, which isn't a state party mainly because of the conflict with Greece. Professor James Kraska thought maybe it would be possible for Turkey to join the United Nation Convention without sort of compromising their position in Greece, but this hasn't happened. So, Turkey is not a member, but generally speaking, they observe the same rules. That means that there is a sort of actual commonality there in terms of peacetime interpretation with, before 2022 the big exception being actually a Ukrainian and Russian deal over the Kerch strait, which nobody else recognized besides Ukraine and Russia, which recognized the Azov Sea as a sort of, I think it was territorial sea of the both states, right, going beyond what you would have normally.
The second legal regime right now is the law of naval warfare, which is the sort of sub-part of law of armed conflict in general. So, you have armed conflict on land and you have armed conflict on the sea. I think the most important thing to understand here is that there is the concept of neutral seas under the law of naval warfare, meaning that the territorial seas of, let's say Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Georgia, they are all neutral seas where Russian and Ukrainian vessels can feel sort of safe and where hostilities take place. So, for example, when Russia brings new ships into the Black Sea for the Bosporus they usually sort of trace the northern Turkish coastline in order to remain in neutral water, so they are not threatened by Ukrainian vessels or Ukrainian hostility. Same goes for Ukrainian shipping and commercial shipping, which goes from the Ukrainian ports between Snake Island and the mainland through Romanian and then Bulgarian territorial sea. And this protects them from becoming potentially the victim of hostilities.
00:26:15 Kelly O'Neill
Can you remind us how far out how many nautical miles belong to each nation, where the territorial waters...
00:26:22 Markus Vaher
So territorial sea is 12 nautical miles. That's about 18 kilometers [Kelly: mm], I think. And there is also the exclusive economic zone, which sort of extends 200 nautical miles, or when it meets like a middle point with the exclusive economic zone of another state, so most of the Black Sea is exclusive economic zones of the different littoral states [Kelly: mm]. But for the Law of naval warfare, that doesn't matter. So the EEZ it's still in the game. You can still have naval warfare [Kelly: right] in the EEZ.
00:26:57 Kelly O'Neill
And shipping, how, to what extent has the need to stay within the territorial waters of neutral states actually changed shipping lanes? Has it meant that shipping lanes actually have shifted, or is that where they were sailing regardless?
00:27:08 Markus Vaher
It definitely has shifted, basically beginning of the war Russia defined, I think it's 47 degrees, basically a latitude above which they would conduct hostilities against Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia during the Black Sea Grain Initiative, they agreed on specific shipping lanes for grain cargo to pass through. It has shifted over time. So, I think Russia proposed one lane and Ukraine proposed two and they don't over overlap necessarily, but from what I gather, they're all in use.
00:27:40 Anastasiia Pereverten
But the Black Sea Grain initiative was ended in July 2023 and since then Ukraine established new trade routes that are happening in the territorial waters of Romania and Bulgaria. Otherwise, it was impossible to protect the cargo. So, right now Ukraine mostly transports its exports to ports in Romania and Bulgaria, and there's still some trade happening with Istanbul directly, but it's essentially a new trade route that those countries allowed to be happening in their territorial waters.
00:28:14 Kelly O'Neill
And could you tell us a little bit on about the kind of maritime geography of mines?
00:28:19 Anastasiia Pereverten
Well, I wish I knew more about the geography of mines. It's not that widely reported where exactly mines are being distributed. So, first of all, Ukraine after the start of the full-scale invasion had the need to mine its coast and its territorial waters to hold the Russian Black Sea fleet further away, and Russia still continued to use Black Sea fleet for targeting Ukrainian cities. And obviously for the trade for a very long time, Odesa ports and all the ports that were in Odesa greater area were essentially blockaded. Russians also started using mining of Black Sea waters mainly in my understanding to pose a threat for Ukrainian cargo ships, essentially undermining Ukrainian's ability to sustain the economy.
What happened next, and I don't know how much of unintended consequence it was for Russia, but inevitably some of the mines were drifting towards the territorial waters of Romania and Bulgaria. Some of them were caught as close to the coast of Romania ‘s three kilometers. It started disturbing local fishermen, but I'm not sure realistically what threat it poses to fishermen, because most of the mines are made to be triggered by a much larger weights. So, it's not necessarily that the fishermen would be blown up at sea. But it definitely causes a lot of anxiety when you have mines drifting towards your coast. Yeah, so between 2022 and 2024, I believe, there were over 100 mines that were caught in the Black Sea, but the question of demining really lays on whether (a) mining has stopped. So it doesn't make sense to risk demining equipment and people who do the work if mining continue. Demining, I think, the primary -for Ukraine - the primary goal of demining would be decreasing the risk for commercial ships. Because of the mining, there is a significant fear for the commercial ships to enter Black Sea.
00:30:34 Kelly O'Neill
So, with international law and the law of naval warfare, which kind of defines very stable territorial water boundaries. But now we're talking about mines that are moving and shifting through water space. Is there a role play … what does international law have to say about this problem?
00:30:50 Markus Vaher
So, regarding mining, not a whole lot. I mean, essentially, it's an explosive ordinance that doesn't have a flag on it. Could have come from anywhere. So, if the mine drifts into, let's say, Romanian territorial sea, where they have sovereign rights, they could say, you know, this is Ukrainian, this could be Russia and they don't know. It is just the threat to shipping and I think in that sense mines are almost like a … If they sort of accidentally leave the area that is declared for hostilities, then it's sort of like a force majeure, like a accident, basically. I think what was sort of more surprising for me was this whole idea of the blockade. Under the Law of Naval warfare, you have the idea of a lawful blockade, which is I think more strongly rooted in \ the European tradition. So this is not law that is necessarily binding, but there is this very authoritative document called the San Remo Manual, which basically lays out all the rules of naval warfare. And usually it's written up by experts in constant consultation with different states, so that it would actually make sense. And under that manual you would have, I think six conditions of when is a blockade lawful, right? It has to be declared, it has to, you know, lead through medical assistance for civilian population, these kinds of things. From my conversation with professor Kraska, basically we took away that Russia imposed a de facto blockade. It filled like four of the six criteria for it to be lawful. There were some incidents at the beginning of the war which were actually maritime casualties where commercial ships were hit by Russian warships, and we don't know if this was intentional or this was, you know, undisciplined fire, as it often is with the Russian army and Navy. Then it sort of becomes just a normative question, right? Is it blockade lawful or not? Well, does it really matter if you can't really do much at the end, and that is the position that American legal scholars would have on blockades. So, from Rhode Island, they just released the second edition of the Newport Manual on Naval Warfare. And I think that I haven't read the text because I don't have access to it. It came out this week. But it would be interesting to see what they say about blockades because that was supposed to change between the old edition and the new, and I… because of this sort of Russian example of a blockade.
00:33:39 Kelly O'Neill
So, we're in an interesting moment really in the evolution of a body of law governing such things as being driven specifically by Russia's invasion, full scale invasion of Ukraine.
00:33:50 Anastasiia Pereverten
But there's also something to be said about Russia’s de facto blockades in Azov Sea prior to the full scale invasion. When I was talking to security expert and the associate of the center Dmitry Gorenburg, he emphasized that some of the ports that were still central for Ukraine prior to 2014 were de facto blocladed by Russian military in Kerch and Kerch Strait in Azov Sea, where it wasn’t really a blockade but they would announce trainings or inspection of every single ship that comes through that would slow down things significantly. So, on multiple of these ports, particularly Mariupol and Berdiansk, like, you couldn't really count on them starting in 2014. I also have to correct myself. I earlier said that Ismail stopped working. But it wasn't Ismail, it was Berdiansk. The other port that stopped working was Berdiansk, not Ismail.
00:34:38 Markus Vaher
Right. So, to that point, the big case regarding the Kerch Strait and the Azov Sea, we came out of this 2018 incident where four Ukrainian ships were essentially arrested. Ukrainian, I think coastal patrol ships, were arrested by Russian warships and then there was a big sort of question whether they were, you know, the Russians were claiming Ukrainians were violating the law for the Ukrainian claim to make sense, they would have had to admit that they're an international armed conflict with Russia, which would have been a very bad look and have had huge legal implications for the rest of Ukraine. So they didn't want to do it and there was like, I think the case continues to be debated; there hasn't been sort of conclusion to that. But basically that put the de facto blockade before 2022. However, it wouldn't have really affected commercial shipping as much as the current one does.
00:35:37 Kelly O'Neill
So, in the beginning of our conversation, I think you were gesturing toward the importance of state capacity to deal with all of these ... There's so many variables in play that really can't be untangled. [Anastasiia: Yeah] To what extent is it more a question of state capacity of naval capacity, the ability of the Black Sea fleet to act to kind of enforce its … the interests of the Russian Federation, or is it … Is the constraining factor a body of international law, or is the constraining factor global economic demand? What would you identify as the main source of constraint in terms of preventing these states from dealing with these issues that you're describing playing out in the Kerch strait along the coast of the Black Sea?
00:36:22 Anastasiia Pereverten
I think currently Ukraine is the main actor in the region that has the problems and the issues and it's trying to… Look, even if you're looking at the number of port calls starting the full scale invasion, it's significantly dropped. But by 2024 Bulgaria, Romania, Türkiye have recovered fully to the prewar level of port calls. Ukraine hasn't, obviously. Plus, I think part of the recovery for Romania and Bulgaria was the fact that Ukrainian shipping was now taking place through those ports. For Ukraine, it's (a) Russian attacks, (b) the lack of resources. So even in case with the development of alternative trade routes. And it can come in different shapes and forms, right? It can be simply road construction, can be railway network development. There is a plan by EU Commission to connect to Ukraine to the trans-European transport network; it's currently connected in one road that leaves from Lviv, to Kyiv, to Mariupol then. But all of this projects that are kind of being discussed are going to take decades, probably. And Ukraine has a pressing need in supporting its economy here and now. Another thing is, with the occupation of southern eastern territories, the number of, the volume of production has decreased in steel, with Azovstal plant. And still there's another thing that relates to the trade in Black Sea we often talk about it in the context of agricultural trades and food security and how important it was to renew Ukrainian wheat and corn and sunflower seed oil trade to the Black Sea, but statistically it's steel, iron ore and mineral fuels that are taking up the majority of the volume of exports in the Black Sea. So Ukraine is facing all of these issues with and having two gigantic constraints that are Russian attacks on the ports; even in December of 2024, there was an incident where the Russian attack on Odesa seaport killed the crew members of a commercial ship. So, the attacks are ongoing, the mining is still a problem, and Ukraine is trying to make the best of the resources that it has. One of the things that actually sets a precedent for Ukraine and for the international community is the system of risk reduction, and essentially an insurance system in which the state takes up responsibility for a big portion of the loss in case something happens to the commercial ship that was established after Russia withdrew from the Black Sea Grant initiative in 2023.
00:39:18 Kelly O'Neill
That sounds expensive.
00:39:19 Anastasiia Pereverten
Yeah, but I think Ukraine didn't really have a lot of alternatives and it seems to be working. Ukraine hasn't recovered its level of seaborne trade compared to 2021, but it's close to that same level and with the limited number of ports, I think that's pretty impressive.
00:39:38 Markus Vaher
I would say the biggest constraints on Russia is Ukrainian sort of ability to strike back. So, taking back Snake Island allowed the Black Sea Grain Initiative to take off because most of those trade routes go right next to that island. And with that island firmly in Ukrainian hands, with the destroyer Moskwa from the Russian Black Sea fleet being sunken nearby as well. That means that area of the sea actually came back under Ukrainian control and wasn't as contested. Now we are seeing Ukrainian use of unmanned surface vehicles, [unintelligible voice] but there is also the option of underwater and I think, was it this week or last week, they struck a fighter jet with a naval drone [Anastasiia: Yeah]. Which raises the question of what happens to air traffic over the Black Sea. [Anastasiia: Yeah] Yeah, at the same time, I think this has worked, right? So, this use of naval drones it's going to be huge innovation and I think a lot of people who are dealing with that, for example in the Pacific, in America, are very closely watching what happens there because Ukrainian, sort of, development of very cheap and small scale resistance to these like huge platforms, you know, like a aircraft carrier becomes suddenly very useful. Sorry, useless against a naval drone. And we've seen signs that Western countries and Ukraine have sort of more courage to move around the Black Sea now, I would say. So, for example, NATO makes these flights over the Black Sea to check Russian ports. They collect intelligence and usually they have their signals on so you can see them on flight radar. And they've been making flights as close as they've gotten during the whole war to, like, Novorossiysk to Russian ports to see what's going on there. So I think this is what constraints Russia, if their fleet is basically inoperable then blockade falls apart, Ukraine has more options to increase shipping to return the level of trade that it used to have.
00:41:45 Anastasiia Pereverten
We also covered the topic in the conversation with Dmitry Gorenburg and the problem with like serious asymmetry that Ukrainian intelligence services and Ukrainian military created for Russia is big and it benefits Ukraine. But it doesn't, like solve the problem for Ukraine essentially, right? Currently, Ukrainian unmanned surface vehicles and anti-ship missiles [they] are also domestically produced - that's a huge benefit for Ukraine, a lot of this invasion is domestically produced. So, the drones named Magura are produced in Ukraine and the famous Neptune anti-warship missiles are also produced domestically. Like, those things make Ukrainian capacity to have as much control as possible over Black Sea stronger, but also make Ukraine less dependent on the political events in the UK and the US and in other countries that Ukraine formally relied on for the supply of similar weapons.
Another thing that… it's interesting to track the path of that innovation and how it plays out in the Black Sea. So, Ukraine started using the drones and suddenly, together with the application of the drones and the anti-warship missiles and long-range ballistic missiles, Russian Black Sea fleet was pushed to the eastern part of the sea and back into the harbors. And initially the drones were used in the harbors because it's easier to target warships that are, you know, not moving, standing closer to the coast. But Russians, in response to that, fortified the harbors and the way that we know it is by using American surveillance and intelligence information, mostly so you can on the satellite images, see the new fortification structures around Russian harbors in Crimea and along the Russian Black Sea coast. So Ukrainian unmanned surface vehicles had to switch to attacks at sea and in the group, and that significantly raises the cost of those attacks on the warship. So, one drone costs approximately like $270,000, and when you need like six of them for one attack, it's a little different number. So the chain of innovation, and as far as I've heard, a lot of these things are happening really fast. People try to fix things in both militaries on a pretty high pace.
So, it's a question of, for how long is that an advantage? Like, the comparative advantage doesn't hold up for a very long time. So, Russia built those fortifications in the harbors. Now Ukrainians will need to use more drones to attack those. Like, for the first wave of the of the drones to be maybe, like, caught in nets, and then the next one carries an attack, but so it again increases the cost of it and I guess I'm just trying to make a point that there is no, like, silver bullet solution to that and a lot of currently, like twenty seven of Russian Black Sea fleet ships were either taken out entirely or damaged. Again, those that are damaged are taken out of the fleet for a couple of months. Maybe they will come back. And again, the problem of resources. Resources aren't the same for two countries. The capacities to rearm are different, so as much as I want to be optimistic, I think there is still a plethora of problems to be faced by the Ukrainian side.
00:45:15 Markus Vaher
I would say one more thing to the pace of technological innovation. Legal innovation does not keep up. I'm not sure it's a huge issue right now, but think about it. It's a unmanned surface vessel. That means it's not a ship under international law. It doesn't. It doesn't have a crew it doesn't have a flag usually. It's a piece of state property. If any state claims it, but nothing much more so comparable to, let's say a meteorological float [sharp noise in background] or you know, something that measures salinity in the sea or even, you know, let's say, a satellite, right, satellite falls out of the sky falls into Romanian territorial sea then, you know, Ukraine can say, “hey, our satellite dropped into your sea. Can we get it back?” But it's not, you know, a violation of law. It's not a warship going through someone else's territorial sea in a unlawful way. So the question is, does that give you anymore options? I'm not sure right now just because of the geography of it, like the Russian ports are accessible without having to go through, let's say, Romanian waters.
But it does open up questions for every other conflict around the world. Right? So, let's say if China uses a unmanned surface vessel and, like, goes through American waters in Guam, what do we do then? Right? What is the legal response? Once and from what I understood from my conversations, this is what people are watching, right? So, what are the precedents you're setting for every other potential conflict in the world? The one thing I wanted to mention from before the same question goes for the blockade. One reason why Russia might want to have actually have a lawful blockade is because if it gets blockaded itself to which it is very vulnerable, especially in the Baltic Sea, it would want those blockades also to be lawful in that event. So, the sort of fear of retaliation or setting the precedent constantly is a question regarding what happens in the Black Sea.
00:47:16 Kelly O'Neill
I was literally just about to ask you if because we're setting, we were setting out this story of the pace of technical, technological innovation outpacing legal innovation, if that rendered international law null and void, essentially. But you basically have just kind of explained that there is actually a way for it to retain relevance even in this incredibly dynamic, innovative moment.
00:47:44 Markus Vaher
Right. But the question there is, does it retain relevance because of the sort of doctrine of the law or just because of, sort of, mutually assured destruction that is, you know, up to debate.
00:47:56 Kelly O'Neill
Who's debating it?
00:47:59 Markus Vaher
So legal scholars would debate probably the legal side of things. So exactly this blockade debates I was reading one of these books from last year about this precise case. And the question of whether blockading is even relevant anymore. The same goes for a bunch of other parts of international law, law of the sea as well, which have just sort of expired in some sense. So, like a less sort of militant topic would be marine scientific research, for which the assumption in the law, which was mostly accepted in the 80s, is that the scientific research happens on board chips. [Kelly: mhm] Right now, most of that happens, actually a lot of it happens through satellites. Or again, these like floats, floating devices that don't have ship status, which sort of exist outside of international law. So it's … things are expiring in the law and bringing together a new convention and get the vast majority of world states behind it. I mean, that takes decades.
00:49:06 Kelly O'Neill
Yeah. And, OK, so marine science, this brings us possibly to the question of marine ecologies, right, [Anastasiia: mhm] and what's going on there? Do you want to take that up?
00:49:15 Anastasiia Pereverten
Yeah, so I was preparing for a conversation with a Professor at Harvard who taught a class on war ecologies, Jacinda Tran. She is working for the center of American Studies and History here at Harvard, and I prepared the conversation as sort of the list of problems that I think impact ecology of the Black Sea and inhabitants of the Black Sea, and I would ask all these questions and she would say “yeah, I think it impacts the ecology of the Black Sea.” And with that we started the conversation about the slow violence and the idea that the violence and the war isn't contained to the time frame in which the war is happening and most of the scholarly research that she familiarized me with focuses on the mining or any other problem on land. Not in the water, not in the oceans. And Professor Tran herself said we don’t think enough about water because we live on land. Still, we discussed a couple of issues.
So, first of all, there is a problem of ecocide that Russia has been, I believe, rightfully accused of with the destruction of Kakhovka Dam, but also the mining of the Black Sea can be probably considered as a part of it. The question that should be considered within the same frame is mining of the inland waterways in Ukraine, and that's also another issue for the development of alternative trade routes in Ukraine, the mining of the inland water ways, but coming back to the ecology, there are also ships, warships, that are sunken in the Black Sea right now, and the question what toxins, what paints, what metals are used or fuels those ships used. The problem, of course, is the lack of data accessible right now, because the sea is presently at war, at use in the war [Kelly: mhm], so most of our discussion was very speculative, like we know that those things are bad, we know that they affect water pollution negatively, obviously. One fallacy that a lot of people fall into, I think, and Professor Tran emphasized this point, is that there's this idea that because oceans are so expansive and big, they self-detox, like you can kind of dump all you want into the water and just dissolve, but there was an incident last year, in December, when two Russian ships crashed in Azov Sea and dumped 9000 tonnes of oil into the sea, and even though the accident happened in Azov Sea, obviously it affected Black Sea, there is a question of sound pollution or audio effects of the warfare on the fish that lives in the sea. In 2022, there was a phenomena that's not entirely explained, but the hypothesis is that it was specifically the audio effects of the warfare that made dolphins die massively, and that was noticed not only in Ukraine but also in Türkiye and Bulgaria, with dolphins just throwing themselves on the coast. Coming back to the Kakhovka Dam destruction, dam contained very big number, a huge volume of sediments, agricultural chemicals, potentially heavy metals that were also released into Black Sea. I don't know in numbers scientifically how much it has changed the percentage of any given chemical in the Black Sea, but we know that it had its negative impact on the Black Sea ecology. There's also a risk to the livelihoods of people that live on the coast, we talked about mines, we talked about fishermen, that's something to be considered.
Another connection that I think is not talked enough about is the connection between herbicide and ecocide. So, it turns out we've all heard the term ecocide. Turns out the concept of it was first coined during the Vietnam War and it came out exactly out of the discussion about herbicide, so destruction of the built environment and its connection to the destruction of the plant life and ecological environment, and when we were talking about cities on the coastline like Mariupol being demolished to the ground, it is to be assessed how much of a long term effect it has on the ecology in that area, the waterways around it, the farmland, and I was asking all these questions about the ships and the mines and the debris of destroyed cities and Professor Tran said that to her, it seemed like the line that sort of united all of these questions was waste, and the waste that comes out of the war, and it made me think about the waste found in the trenches or simply any localities where Russian soldiers resided during occupations. In every single site there's so much rubbish found, and it almost seems illogical, like, you lived there, all of you lived there for a couple of weeks or months until the place was liberated, why is it so… why is it in such terrible condition? Why is there so much trash and waste? And as I was describing that, Professor Tran said that it's actually very indicative of the settler colonialism mindset. The idea that you have to first render the place disposable and with it the people who live there, the animals who live there, and that also, unfortunately and very tragically, can be seen in Askania-Nova, the National Park in Ukraine where Russian soldiers just go hunting in, often killing animals that are in the Red book. So that mindset of a colonialist who first has to render the space disposable and almost like unrescuable, unsolvable, to then claim it, I thought was almost like a diagnosis for a lot of occupiers, not only Russia in this case, and in some ways, that mindset have to come before the war can be enacted even, you have to first allow yourself to cause that harm to the land to later claim it. And the claiming part is very notable in the coastal city of Mariupol where you destroyed it and now you're trying to rebuild it on top of the debris and yeah, that question of destroying the ecological environment during the war time, including obviously polluting the waters is a red threat that I think really captures the dynamics of the, how war transforms physical environment.
00:56:48 Kelly O'Neill
It's really interesting because it sounds like you're both describing the weaponization of time, of time scales, we have the pace of innovation, the pace of legal transformation, the pace of acquisition of data, like the things you can know and that you can't know, and that we're kind of seeing a mobilization or weaponization of time, right? You can, the settler colonial mindset enables you to play the long game with space, and with lives and with ecosystems. Markus, you had wanted to jump in there.
00:57:16 Markus Vaher
Your point about the waste that a system or a situation produces really reminds me of Polish writer, Kapuscinski, who wrote a travelogue of the Soviet Union in the 80s where he asked “what is this system that produces so much barbed wire?” Like, I think if you count up the amount of barbed wire per country, it usually indicates quite a lot, and I think this is the same question you could ask in the Black Sea right, like why? You know? I guess like, yeah, we can talk about analysis and of why the war happened, that’s not my point. It's more about the sort of just like an emotional understanding of, like, look, this is our common sort of heritage of mankind, right. Or legally speaking, it's the heritage of Black Sea littoral states who have, you know, sovereign rights in in those areas. You mentioned the damage to various industries, I think the tourism industry for all the countries involved is a very important part. You know, I can't really imagine if a dark fleet tanker that is selling Russian oil in South Asia makes a mistake and let's say all of Georgia and coastline, and Abkhazian coastline is suddenly polluted with oil. That’s death blow to the local economy, right, same on the Romanian Bulgarian side. I mean, it's unimaginable. And that's the risk that they're currently taking all the time. Countries have some level of jurisdiction to prevent pollution under the UN Convention, so, regarding the dark fleet and that accident in the Kerch Strait, not in the Kurdish Strait, but in let's say Turkish waters, Turkey could potentially arrest ships if they think those ships are I'm forgetting the exact wording here, but if they are violating rules for the prevention of pollution and oil pollution specifically, so regarding that, the laws from the 80s still work. The question is more do you want to apply them? There's hundreds of these tankers and there's, you know, the resource cost of figuring out which of them are clearly violating pollution controls and then also actually detaining, inspecting them, that's huge amounts of resources which nobody has. So what do you do? The same question in the Baltic Sea, right, the Danish Straits and the Turkish Straits, they're both straits that have specific treaties about them. It's very confusing to everybody involved what you can do within those treaties to prevent shipping that is very risky for the environment.
01:00:04 Kelly O'Neill
In your conversations with the various experts, you obviously talked about all of these problems, the various forms of reaction and participation by various state partners. Did your conversations ever turn toward paths forward? Potential resolutions, even to small pieces of this puzzle? Or is it simple? Are we still just in a moment of bleakness and stasis, not stasis, but a bit of stagnation? The fact that the war is ongoing just makes it impossible to move toward resolution?
01:00:36 Anastasiia Pereverten
I wanted to make a follow up point what Marcus was saying, Marcus referred to Georgia's tourism industry and I was meaning to complicate the image of all the problems by what's happening right now in Georgia. Russia announced its plans to build another military base in Abkhazia, and Singaporean and Chinese conglomerate is now in negotiations to acquire 49% of the Anaklia port that would be very close to Abkhazia, but it's on the Georgian territory and that plays into the increasing risks of to Georgia, and to the Black Sea. So, I, it's very possible that we're still in the moment of bleakness. [laughs] I was, I was trying to ask those questions, and I would ask about the things that should be done by particular states or maybe venues for regional cooperation. One of the things that came out of it was the idea that countries that have common interests, meaning, in this case, probably it would be Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, to present the same line of advocacy for international community as in, amplifying the same asks [Kelly: mhm], amplifying the same warnings, because to all of these countries, the major threat will continue to be Russia and it will come in different shapes and forms, not only direct security threat, but also democratic backsliding, polarization in those states. So, acting in a more or less united way would be very beneficial, and in what platform it should be happening? I struggle to say. I was asking those questions to both of the security experts that I talked to [laughs], and both of them kind of said that every single security or, like, just generally regional cooperation platform, whether it was like Black Sea Force or Black Sea Harmony, like all of it kind of works until it doesn't, so any form of cooperation, and mainly the bilateral cooperation of those states with each other, would strengthen the region facing primarily Russian threats.
01:02:59 Markus Vaher
The future scenarios… we didn't really discuss solutions in my conversations, but more about contingencies. So, one of the big questions in my conversation with Professor Carol Saivetz from MIT was “what will Turkey do?” Because, while everybody sort of agrees that the war between Ukraine and Russia is catastrophic for both sides, who is the winner? In Turkey, it is in some sense is the winner? I mean, I don't think the instability benefits them, but they have managed to play their cards such that, you know, Turkish businesses are still in Russia, Turkish businesses are still in Europe, and they sort of play the middleman as often as possible. They don't recognize, however, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and they probably won't considering that they want to retain this role of middleman, and if they did that, they would you know, Ukrainians wouldn't sit down with the Turks for negotiations where the Turkish are mediating. So, one big question is what will Turkey do? What are their sort of domestic impulses where right now you're seeing sort of increased authoritarianism, does that also matter in foreign policy? Will that put them, you know, closer to, let's say, Russia and Iran than the European Union? Or will they go a sort of third path? What are their interests? Because for them, right now, it's actually going very well. Their main adversary in the Black Sea, which was Russia, has been weakened significantly. They have the control over the straits, no warships have entered the Black Sea after the war started except for ones which had their sort of home base in the Black Sea, so a few Russian vessels returned but others were rejected, right, and the same way British vessels that they wanted to give to Ukraine couldn't pass through the Turkish Straits because Turkey said no, they hold the cards. So, if there is some sort of conclusion of the war in Ukraine, or at least a ceasefire, the question is what does Turkey do then? And nobody really knows, at least from my conversations we didn't really have a good clue about this. Maybe somebody who is a specialist in Turkey would know better.
01:05:08 Anastasiia Pereverten
I was also looking at Türkiye’s role and specifically in the matter of trade, Türkiye is one of the big, is the biggest trader essentially in the Black Sea and its biggest partner for trade is Russia, and to this day, the trade between Russia and Türkiye in the Black Sea is the biggest partnership. Türkiye is the biggest exporter of products to Russia, it's in the top ten suppliers to Russia right now, not top three, but top ten definitely, and one of the experts that I talked to pointed at that sort of almost like historical status that Türkiye likes to hold and it is the guard of the sea, obviously due to the straits and the ability to invoke, to invoke the Montreux doctrine, Türkiye will probably come out as the winner and in case of the ceasefire or some sort of stop to the war, Türkiye will be able to increase its trade with all the countries in the, in in the region, but primarily Russia.
01:06:05 Kelly O'Neill
So that's, I think, 3 really interesting takeaways about what we're learning about the region itself and how it's shifting, one is that almost Ana, as you were saying, you become a region by acting like one, you don't look it up in the dictionary and find out that you have certain qualities and therefore become a region, the Black Sea becomes a region if the constituent pieces of it band together and act as a region, which is interesting. Second take away being that the Black Sea region, at least in the foreseeable future, can only be functional without Russia participating in that right, so, so Russia kind of comes out of the region in certain ways, right? Obviously it's still present. It has some, you know it's acting, but it isn't part of the group of players who see themselves coming together, and the third take away I'm hearing is that there’s this massive kind of historical pendulum swing between the Slavic world and the Turkish world for control of the Black Sea has swung again. It was, you know, on the Turkish side, the Ottomans side before, and it swung north to becoming, you know, dominated by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and it has swung back in that direction.
01:07:25 Anastasiia Pereverten
And I think we'll get more clarity on the status of each actor in the region as more time passes in Trump administration. It's important that before 2025, multiple infrastructure projects on the Black Sea coast were happening with the support of the US, so, the Georgian port Porti, had the construction of additional port capacities, or terminal capacities with the support of the US, and the training of the militaries of the NATO members and Georgia and Ukraine were happening with support of the US. The demining ships were also, I think some of them were supplied by the US, but the training was often carried out by the US militaries and some of it was done under the umbrella of NATO, but other things purely through the US Black Sea strategy and Black Sea strategy for the US is a very new thing, it was only, it has only appeared after the full scale invasion, so there is almost a consensus that most of the things that were happening in the past couple of years under the project of the Black Sea strategy will be on hold and may be terminated entirely, but we don't know, so there is a clear understanding that the role of the US has decreased, but there isn’t clarity on to what extent, and as more clarity will be gained on that by Türkiye and Russia and other actors I think their behaviors may be shifting too.
01:08:52 Kelly O'Neill
Anything else that you feel like we're missing?
01:08:56 Markus Vaher
Well, one hot topic is the subsea infrastructure.
01:08:58 Kelly O'Neill
Oh yeah that’s… oh my gosh.
01:09:01 Markus Vaher
But honestly, in the Black Sea right now, one thing that helps it, it's pretty deep, so these kinds of anchor moves that you see in the Baltic for most of the Black Sea don’t work. The other question there is a lot of the transport that is underwater is Russia, Turkey, so when it comes to, let's say, European or Ukrainian supply of gas from Azerbaijan, essentially through Turkey and Georgia, then that comes on land, same goes for Greece, and I think it goes all the way out to Albania from Turkey, so this sort of, they call it the Southern route, I think for gas pipelines actually not that affected was one of the things I was surprised to discover. It seems like this loophole has been discovered that, you know, international law doesn't really say much about the submarine infrastructure and doesn't give very explicit provisions to protect it. So, in that situation we'll see, maybe somebody comes up with some way to exploit that gap in the rules.
01:09:54 Kelly O'Neill
And what would be the venue for creating those new rules and implementing them?
01:10:01 Markus Vaher
Well, you would want to have an international convention with enough states and enough of world shipping tonnage involved for it to matter, I don't think at this time we have that sort of consensus that I don't think Russia nor China would sign up to that as they did for the previous convention that was signed in 1982 and entered into force 1995. So, these take decades and I don't see that happening, I think the rules have to emerge more naturally between states and through, like, some state custom state practice.
01:10:49 Kelly O'Neill
And do you see shipping companies themselves and or insurance companies like Lloyd's and other companies playing an active role in trying to hash these things out or do they kind of sit back and wait for states to take the lead [trails off]
01:11:08 Markus Vaher
Well, they are very engaged, right? Because their bottom line is at risk. From what I see, what has sort of happened because of we were talking about the sort of shadow fleet tankers, what has happened because of them is that the shipping industry has become much more transparent in the parts that are willing to be transparent and then much worse in the parts that sell sanctioned Russian oil to South Asian states, essentially.
01:11:36 Kelly O'Neill
And in some cases, those are the same companies just behaving differently in different regions?
01:11:29 Markus Vaher
No. [Kelly: ok] So the companies like Lloyd's for example and other sort of mutual insurance clubs that insure ships, they are sort of on the western side here, it's more a question of if a 15-year-old oil tanker that has questionable security has insurance from a Russian state insurance company which is like unlikely to ever compensate you if you're not on Russia's side. Those are basically very dangerous ships with a bunch of oil cargo in them with very questionable insurance, meaning you know, if there was an oil spill, let's say in Turkish waters, Turkey cannot be fully assured that they'll get the money on top of the fact that there would have been environmental damage.
01:12:22 Kelly O'Neill
So, what are the things that you're going to be taking with you from these conversations, which I know, we, you know obviously you are working on topics that really interest you, but neither of you normally work on the Black Sea, it's not your home base in terms of your research. So, what are the takeaways for you, and do you see some of these issues influencing how you see the Baltics, how you see the Middle East, how you see US relations? Do you see through lines? Do you? Yeah. What do you? What do you take from this?
01:12:55 Markus Vaher
I mean, I think it's a matter of taking initiative at this point in a lots of ways, like all of these issues, right, this exactly this idea that you have the poly crisis, ten houses are burning at the same time and you only have one fire truck, in that situation, having done this research, I see how much more this conversation should be happening, and how unequipped we are a lot of the time to have them, those conversations, think like the sort of Black Sea Baltic Sea comparison in the Baltics like doesn't exist really, just because thinking about the Black Sea doesn't come naturally. There are obviously enthusiasts, right? So, people in the defense industry, they would care about the naval drones, they would be interested in that. People in working on International Maritime law, of course, they pay attention because this is where the action is happening. But then, sort of, general public, generalists who are, you know, politicians who are decision makers, they don't really know enough. And because they don't know enough, they also don't, sort of, perhaps, find the resources to then do more. That's the, sort of, Baltic view, I think closer it looks a bit different.
01:14:17 Anastasiia Pereverten
I think on the part with disciplinary experts, who you would think are enthusiasts in expanding their analysis to Black Sea, I was surprised how rare it was, actually. I had to send like over ten invitations to get, like, three yes, even though I was specifically targeting like maritime experts or security experts, many of them said “no, I don’t know much about Black Sea,” and even with those who agreed to talk with me, a lot of times I would provide them regional context and they would provide me with their comments based on what they know from other topics of research, in this case the war’s impact on ecology. The analysis of that person primarily focuses on Vietnam War, and I had to give all the particularities about the Russian Ukraine war and the Black Sea and the Azov Sea, so there is a lack of even materials in English about those things. Some of the things I had to look up in Ukrainian to find news, like, the crash of two tankers in Azov Sea and the mass dying of dolphins, like I had to find those articles in Ukrainian. The lack of materials, lack of data, most of the materials published on the topic of Black Sea port blockade or trade, a lot of them are very like speculative, or there is just like this many numbers that you can get from the European Commission and maybe some government agencies that have data on the number of port calls and the tonnage of the trade, but otherwise it was really hard to like find particularities and not general sort of, “here all the bad things that are taking place right now”, and I think the level of complexity is something that I want to take away from this experience to analysis of other regions, I think a lot of times when I read the news, I don't always go through the mental process of imagining how many other problems stand behind it, and a lot of comments on international crisis are coming from people who don't do that too, so they just suggest solutions as if those were so easy to find, but I think as the problems faced by Ukrainian state in the Black Sea show, a lot of solutions are just not possible.
01:16:35 Markus Vaher
And this comes back to your, I think, second question, which was “what kind of thinkers we are”, it’s very clear that we're very pragmatic thinkers, right? We would want to have like the phone numbers [Ana laughs] to every sort of port director in Ukraine so that we could figure this out very quickly. I think this is part of like a general academic process of trying to tie in people who work in these fields, who are sort of voluntary observers, like these Twitter accounts that follow shipping in the Bosporus, right Bosporus observer, very popular accounts. Academics could tie that in more, and you could have, I guess, potentially the platforms, I don't know, blogs right, Black Sea blog, which then actively incorporates all those things. But you know, this thing would have to happen up close, right? It would be hard to do from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
01:17:26 Kelly O'Neill
Thank you both. This was amazing, I've learned a ton. I appreciate all of your work. [applauds]
01:17:31 Anastasiia Pereverten
Thank you. [Kelly: Thank you.] Thank you. That was exciting.
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