Still bound and determined that the maritime incident last weekend in the Sea of Azov portends a full-scale war with Russia, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called on all NATO nations and other allied states to start relocating warships en masse to the sea to “assist Ukraine” in a conflict.
Poroshenko singled out Germany as nation that should rush warships to the area, saying that Germany needs to consider where Putin will strike next after taking over Ukraine. He added that he is positive Putin wants the whole country.
As a practical matter, NATO nations are severely limited in the warships they could send to the area by the 1936 Montreux Convention, which severely limits the number of warships allowed to pass through the Bosporus Straits.
This means that even if Germany had a vast navy, which it doesn’t, they would not legally be able to deploy large numbers in the Black Sea or Sea of Azov, and certainly would need more than a couple of frigates to square off with the entire Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Do they not know the depth of the water in the Azov Sea????
Is Ukraine already a member of the obsolete NATO??
How do you think war ships can standup to modern missiles in the black sea ? I don’t think they would last very long
As others have said on here, the Azov sea is very shallow, Ukraine has had two gunboats (30mm cannon and grenade launchers) and a tug impounded, whilst in the Azov, Russia has Buyan M class corvettes armed with Kalibr missiles which have a range of 1500 kilometres. They have a shallow draft and are quite well armed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyan-class_corvette
That sounds to me like the “help me I am drowning” plea from Poroshenko. He knows that NATO is not going to do that.
The larger context is Europe’s history. Wars galore with massive killing and destruction until 1945. What changed then was that leaders of France and Germany proposed and succeeded in bringing about a network which eventually became the European Union backed by NATO. Perfect? No. Effective? Yes, there have been no major wars with massive killing and destruction for almost 80 years. For Europe that is new. Its success also contributed to Brexit.
If a solution for averting wars is the formation of larger networks such as the EU, where does Ukraine fit? Given its history the only logical answer is: in the Russian Federation with a very large degree of autonomy. That should be the goal. All talks about in the EU or in NATO are very dangerous fantasies.