Russian-Ukrainian dispute over Tuzla escalates (10/26/03)

Russian-Ukrainian dispute over Tuzla escalates

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - A diplomatic tussle that began with the construction of a dike by Russia to link the Russian Taman Peninsula with the Ukrainian island of Tuzla in the Kerch Strait escalated to full-blown crisis beginning on October 20 when Moscow question Ukraine's sovereignty over the tiny island and demanded proof of the country's right to it.

Twenty-six days after Russian construction vehicles began an unannounced construction project to build a dike into the Kerch Strait in the direction of Tuzla Island, a five-mile strip of land sparsely populated mostly with pensioners and vacationers, the area had become the central focus of an international dispute bordering on armed conflict.

The same day that Moscow announced via diplomatic note that it questioned Ukraine's sovereignty over Tuzla, Kyiv supplanted a border guard detachment that had been carrying out border defense exercises since October 10 with 14 gunboats and aircraft to patrol the area around the Ukrainian-Russian border, which is found 150 meters southeast of the shore of Tuzla.

Two days later, with construction moving to within 200 meters of Tuzla Island, Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma curtailed a state visit to Latin America to return to Kyiv to keep rein over an increasingly vitriolic dialogue between the diplomats of the two states. Upon arrival, Mr. Kuchma immediately flew to the island to meet with Ukrainian officials monitoring the construction of the dike, which the Ukrainian and Russian press refer to as a dam.

As the Ukrainian president returned from Brazil, Ukrainian border troops moved pontoon boats into place to block any attempt to extend the dike into Ukrainian territory. Meanwhile Ukraine's Armed Forces conducted unexpected military training exercises at Chauda, located 70 kilometers (50 miles) south of Tuzla at the southern tip of the Kerch Peninsula. The one-day training, which Ukrainian military officials said was planned in advance, included live-fire exercises and the use of MiG 29 and SU-27 jet aircraft.

With authorities on both sides of the confrontation increasingly warning that the situation could escalate out of control, Ukraine's Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych called for calm and the use of diplomacy to defuse the situation.

"We cannot allow this to turn into armed conflict," warned Mr. Yanukovych on October 21. "We must resolve this at the negotiating table."

On October 22 the prime minister's office announced that Mr. Yanukovych had canceled a trip to Estonia and would fly instead to Moscow on October 24 to meet with his Russian counterpart, Mikhail Kasyanov, to address the Tuzla issue. The agreement to meet came only after Mr. Yanukovych made a personal phone call to Mr. Kasyanov's office. Earlier in the day Russian officials said the Tuzla matter would be discussed only at a previously scheduled meeting of foreign ministers set for October 30.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who until that point had remained uncharacteristically quiet as the crisis evolved, ordered Krasnodar Krai officials to halt construction of the dike on October 22. The Ukrainian press reported that construction was suspended for an hour near midnight, but resumed early in the morning of October 23. Ukrainian government television stated on October 23 that Presidents Putin and Kuchma had held their first telephone conversation on the matter that day, but did not give details.

Later on October 23 Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada, in an uncharacteristic show of unity, passed a resolution condemning the Russian actions as "an unfriendly act that will force Ukraine to revise its current relations with the Russian Federation," with 369 of the 450 members of the parliament supporting the declaration.

The island, ownership of which until now had never been in dispute, lies in a body of water that Kyiv and Moscow have found difficulty in delimiting. Russia would like to leave both the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov undelimited and in common ownership, while Ukraine is seeking a more traditional border delimitation and demarcation.

Russia has defended the building of the dike as a necessary decision made by officials of the Krasnodar Krai, who insist the dike would control ecological damage to the coast of the Taman Peninsula.

Ukraine said it believes the real point behind the construction is to reconnect the island with Russian territory to change the territorial configuration of the Kerch Strait and give Moscow a hedge in border delimitation talks. Although nearly every Russian politician and diplomat has stated that Russia has no intention of connecting to the Ukrainian island, no one has explained where construction will end.

The crisis began when Russia began construction of the dike from its Taman Peninsula in the direction of Tuzla Island on September 29 without informing Ukrainian officials. Ukraine claims that advance notification was required according to a 1994 agreement between the two countries. The crisis deepened after Moscow failed to respond to three diplomatic notes from Kyiv and repeated calls to stop construction in the direction of Tuzla Island.

Now prominent politicians have warned of violent conflict if one of the sides doesn't back down.

"If Russia builds the dam into our territorial waters we should utilize force," explained Ukraine's first president, Leonid Kravchuk, who is currently a lawmaker in the Ukrainian Parliament.

Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Ministry took a more diplomatic stance during a press briefing on October 21 - but also emphasized that all options were open - when spokesman Markian Lubkivskyi stated that Ukraine categorically could not accept the possibility that Russia might link the dike to the island.

"I would like to emphasize that Ukraine will not allow for this in any circumstance," explained Mr. Lubkivskyi, who told The Weekly that the matter of ownership of Tuzla is not open to negotiation.

"It is Ukrainian, just as Lviv is part of Ukraine, or Kyiv," said Mr. Lubkivskyi.

Meanwhile the chief of staff to Russia's president set a confrontational and dangerous tone in an off the cuff statement he later called a joke, which he made to a Ukrainian delegation of journalists on October 21.

"If need be we will do all that is possible and impossible to maintain our position. If need be we can drop a bomb there," said Aleksander Voloshin, according to various press accounts.

While underscoring its "deep concern" over the Russian demand for documentation of Ukraine's right to Tuzla, Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Ministry responded by enumerating a series of treaties and documents, beginning with a 1954 agreement that included Tuzla as part of the Crimean Peninsula territory that was moved from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR under the Soviet Union through to the 1997 agreement of friendship, cooperation and partnership between the now-independent states of Ukraine and the Russian Federation, which the Russian State Duma ratified in 1998. It noted that all official cartographic drawings and maps show Tuzla Island as part of Ukrainian territory.

The Ukrainian diplomatic response also emphasized that under a treaty signed between the two countries in 1994, Russia should have informed Ukraine of the beginning of construction in the Kerch Strait.

The leader of the Russian's State Duma's Committee for International Affairs, Dimitrii Rogozin, questioned the veracity of Ukraine's claim and speculated that Ukraine is relying on an agreement "from the 1970s" signed between minor officials of Krasnodar Krai and the Crimean region, "probably in a drunken condition," reported Interfax-Ukraine.

Other Russian lawmakers, members of the Russian Parliament's upper house, the Federation Council, who were in Kyiv for an inter-parliamentary conference on October 21-22, for the most part also disagreed with Ukraine's official diplomatic stance, some of them presenting a single map from 1955 in which the island is shown within Russian territory as proof of the contentiousness of Ukraine's claim. Nonetheless, most emphasized that while construction had reached a point some 350 meters from the Ukrainian border it had not and would not cross it.

"The construction of the dam is taking place on Russian territory, so it is strange to hear that we need to prove the reason why we are doing it," explained Serhii Mironov, the head of the Federation Council.

Mr. Mironov explained that the point of the project was to develop an "exclusively hydro-technical construction," to prevent the further erosion of the Taman Peninsula coastline, which has already caused agricultural damage.

"This building project is only a Russian attempt to save the environment," said Mr. Mironov.

Ukraine has said it fears that Russian intentions are less honorable. It is claiming that Russia wants to redefine the boundary line between the two states as it now stands to strengthen its negotiating position regarding border delimitation.

Geographers agree that the Ukrainian side of the Sea of Azov in all likelihood contains a wealth of oil and natural gas, as well as abundant fish stocks. Political experts believe that Russia would also like to keep the bodies of water in common ownership in order to keep control over the single shipping lane in the shallow strait, which in large part is routed on the Ukrainian side. This, say political experts, would give Russia control over access to the Sea of Azov - no small matter as Ukraine moves towards NATO membership - as well as allow it to avoid the more than $150 million in shipping fees it now pays to Kyiv annually.

Russian politicians have acknowledged that they believe it is improper that Ukraine should be collecting tariffs from Russia for access to the Kerch Strait.

While Russia has yet to clearly outline the basis for its demand that Ukraine prove it has the right to Tuzla, experts believe it lies in the fact that until 1925 the island was part of Russia's Taman Peninsula and connected to the mainland via a land abutment called a spit. Storms and high winds in 1925 eroded the spit and left it almost completely submerged, with only what is now called Tuzla Island remaining above water.

Some Russian politicians have openly stated that the construction is intended to rebuild the spit and reconnect Tuzla to the Taman Peninsula to reassert Russia's historical claim to the region.

Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, the influential Ukrainian weekly newspaper, said as much when it suggested in an article from October 18 that the Tuzla crisis was a well-thought-through plan to attain control of the Azov Sea region. A front-page story reported that in mid-September a little-publicized Russian plan appeared for cooperation between Russian ministries and departments on diplomatic and military assignments in the Azov and Black Sea region, which came as a result of a declaration by President Putin at the beginning of September that the Azov-Black Sea region was a "zone of Russian strategic interest."

The newspaper noted that on September 30 Russia's Security Council met to address the topic "ways of assuring Russian national security in border areas." The newspaper did not give details of the results of the Russian Security Council meeting, which are generally secretive in nature.

Ukraine has said that it would turn to international bodies, such as the United Nations Security Council or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe for support in its effort to defend its right to Tuzla Island, but only if the dike construction shoud cross the territorial border between the two countries.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, who was on a farewell visit to Kyiv on October 20, said after a meeting with Mr. Kuchma that NATO did not expect to get involved in the Tuzla dispute and that the Ukrainian president had not asked for NATO assistance. He said that at this point the issue remained for Kyiv and Russia to resolve.

U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst agreed with that assessment in a separate statement he made after a conference of the Ukraine-NATO Civic League.

Responding to a question on whether the United States was ready to support Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty, as it had agreed to do when Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in 1994, Mr. Herbst stated: "The United States supports the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine. The U.S. is also friendly with both Russia and Ukraine, and hopes that they will be able to work out this problem."

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