Did Russia Build A Trap For Its Black Sea Fleet?

The Crimea bridge – the bridge that links Russia proper to Crimea has been bombed, and part of the road has collapsed. As the photographs show, the part that has collapsed is away from the central span through which ships and submarines would pass from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea.

In 2016, I wrote about Russia and its Black Sea Fleet and a reason why Russia was bombing ISIS in Syria. The motivation in part was, I wrote, because the northern part of the Black Sea freezes in winter. This affects Russia’s ability to get its Black Sea Fleet out into the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

If the Black Sea freezes, then the Sea of Azov to its northwest definitely freezes. Now that the Crimea Bridge has been bombed, I ask myself a question. If part of the bridge is now in the sea, does the collapse imperil the passage of the Black Sea Fleet from the Sea of Azov? And if it doesn’t, then does the bridge, or rather the big blocks of material of which the bridge is built, become a weak point or trap in some future conflict that can so easily be bombed to block the route?

The Black Sea Fleet has its official primary headquarters and facilities in Sevastopol, which Russia annexed from Ukraine, along with the rest of Crimea, in 2014. The rest of the fleet’s facilities are based in locations on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

So two things. With global warming, does the Sea of Azov and this part of the Black Sea still freeze? And how shallow is the passage and how easy it is to actually block the passage of ships by obstructing the bridge?

The Kerch Strait Incident

The Strait of Kerch at its narrowest is 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) wide with a maximum depth of 15 metres (49 ft).

The Crimea Bridge was opened to traffic in 2016. In November 2018, the Russian coast guard fired upon and captured three Ukrainian Navy vessels after they attempted to sail from the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov through the strait to the port of Mariupol.

To be clear, the Ukranian vessels were entitled to pass from the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov. The dispute was over seeking permissions, notifying whoever should be notified, etc. And of course, the reality of what happened depends on who you ask.

The point though is that during the incident, Russia placed a large a cargo ship under the bridge, blocking the route into the Sea of Azov.

If a large cargo ship can block the route, how much more could collapsed pillars of the bridge itself block the route? So it is a relevant question to ask whether the bridge that facilitates movement between Russia proper and Crimea could be a stone around the neck of the Black Sea fleet, that blocks its own entry to and from the Sea of Azov.

Winter Freezing

In a post from April of this year, researchers from Sofia University reported on winter freezing and stated

Black Sea freezing in winter is observed regularly in its northern parts and near the Kerch Strait. The reason for this is the relatively shallow northwestern shelf part and the river inflow of the three major European rivers Danube, Dnieper, and Dniester, as well as Don through the Azov Sea, carrying a large amount of fresh water to this part of the Black Sea. The global warming that has been observed in recent decades has made these episodes less intense; nevertheless, they exist and impact people who live n the area.

The aim of this study is to analyze the extent of sea-ice variability in the last 15 years, observed by satellite observations, and to describe the weather conditions favorable for freezing to occur. It is found that, in 2006, 2012 and 2017, sea ice extended unusually southward, which is related to the unusually cold winter and weather conditions in these years.

So winter freezing is a current problem for the Black Sea Fleet, And that ties in to a report by Reuters from September 20, 2022, that Russia had moved its Black Sea submarine fleet to Novorossiysk on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, a port that does not freeze in winter.

The more I think of it, the more I think that the bridge is a huge potential self-inflicted liability for Russia.

Whither Now United Kingdom

There are twenty-eight constitutional monarchies worldwide, of which the United Kingdom is one.

It is often referred to as the British monarchy. To be accurate, it is the monarchy of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, and the British Overseas Territories. But the name doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily.

The powers of the monarch with regard to the conduct of Government are purely ceremonial. As of 8 September 2022, the Government is His Majesty’s Government. And my thoughts are with what Charles III must be feeling now that he has stepped into a role that is surely one of the most special, strange, and demanding.

The role of the monarch has steadily reduced since Magna Carta in 1215, and brought to an end with the beheading of Charles I in 1649. The republican Commonwealth of England lasted just a hair’s breadth of time – until 1660. But when the monarchy was restored it was not the same creature. With the Bill of Rights of 1689 it was made clear that the monarch did Parliament’s bidding and the role became ceremonial – a Constitutional monarchy.

As an example, when the monarch reads the speech of what his or her Parliament intended to do, the speech is prepared by the Government and the monarch does not utter a single word that is not already prepared.

But the monarch does have power. If the Parliament of MPs votes that it has no confidence in the Government, then the Government must resign and a General election must be held. If the Government refuses to go, the monarch has the power to dismiss it.

And the allegiance of the Armed Forces is to the Crown and not to the Government. In times of civil strife that can matter.

The bottom line is that save for when the Government and the people are at odds, the monarch’s only power is through the myth of the rightness of the pyramid of entitlement. Looking at the span of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, that pyramid has taken some hard knocks. Few people look back at the colonial history of Britain with the same misty eyed view that was the general view in 1952 when she became Queen.

The real power of the monarchy is in how deeply the loss of the Queen will be felt over the coming days and weeks and months..

Charles promised that once King he would rein in on his views on controversial matters. But everything is political in this modern world – and Charles has strong views on the environment and food security.

If this were a country governed by a Government of good repute; if this was a time plenty and rising expectations, then Charles might feel constrained to keep quiet. But the Government and the last Prime Minister are seen by not a few as a bunch of inept charlatans or worse. Charles might well feel he can open his mouth.

A Personal Note On The Death Of Queen Elizabeth II

Tamara and I booked to see Much Ado About Nothing, being put on by the National Theatre and beamed to our local Picturehouse cinema. It was Tamara’s idea and I was happy to go along with it. I feared that the comedy would be insubstantial, but in fact it is much weightier than say ‘Taming Of The Shrew’ that we saw recently. And it was well acted and the set design was terrific.

Meanwhile, this afternoon, Queen Elizabeth II died.

Tamara and I were late to arrive at the cinema, and when we walked into Screen 1, everyone was silent, as were the audience at the National Theatre in London who were on the screen. We realised that someone at the London venue had asked for silence to acknowledge the passing of the Queen. Then the National Anthem was played and people in the cinema stood up. Tamara and I were standing already because we had just walked in, and we hadn’t yet gone to our seats.

Then a man at the London venue spoke and said that the show would go on. And we expected the show to begin more or less straight away. But that didn’t happen. Instead the curtain with the words Much Ado About Nothing filled the screen and there was no sound. And it just went on and on. It was eerie, as though it was echoing the breakdown in the smooth flow of things. So we all sat in silence, just watching this curtain remind us that is was Much Ado About Nothing.

I was thinking that after three million years of evolution we still do not know what death is, or at the absolute least one can say there is no consensus about what it is.

And I was thinking of the living. How will the country deal with the event? Britain is faced with the worst civil discontent for a generation. People talk openly about the cost of living crisis. If you know the British you know that they do not talk about money and how tight it is and how bad things are – not in public, between strangers. But they are doing now. It is not taboo. Rather, it has become a part of the public discourse. That’s how bad things are.

Post Office Workers, Royal Mail workers, Rail workers, Legal Aid barristers – they are all staging strikes for better pay and conditions.

We have a new Prime Minister who is there because the last one was kicked out.

The pound is at its lowest value in a generation.

So how will the country react to the death of the Queen? Will it draw people together or will it be one more event that leads to the break in the ties that keep civil society intact?

So here we are in the play, near the end. In a moment Claudio will find out that Hero, his beloved, is not dead and everything will end happily.

Except the link to the National Theatre broke at that moment, and the last we see before the screen goes blank, is Claudio’s hand open, waiting, frozen.

The audience sits, waiting to see whether the link can be restored (it cannot), and there is a strange and patient mood in the air, and behind it all, the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

The Last Prime Minister

I wrote the following in the few minutes before the next British Prime Minister Liz Truss was announced. The election of her to the role by Conservative Party members followed the ejection of Boris Johnson from the job for his unforced errors and disregard for the truth.

An unforced error is a mistake in play that is attributed to one’s own failure rather than to the skill or effort of one’s opponent. And there were several that resulted from Johnson’s disdain for what I believe he saw as petty rules. He was attractive to those who wanted a strong leader precisely because he was a buccaneer, treading where others more timid feared to tread. As in many things, qualities have a good and a bad side.

Prorogration

The first unforced error was that on 28 August 2019, the Parliament of the United Kingdom was ordered to be prorogued by Queen Elizabeth II upon the advice of the Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson. Britain is a constitutional monarchy, meaning that the reigning monarch has little power, and ‘on the advice of’ is a particularly British way of saying the the prime minister ordered the Queen to prorogue Parliament.

A prorogation is the discontinuance of a session of Parliament without dissolving it. Johnson’s purpose in proroguing Parliament for an unusually extended period was to severely limit the time that the MPs in the House of Commons had to consider the Brexit Bill that was before it. 

Concerned citizens raised a legal challenge and the Supreme Court ruled that the prorogation was unlawful.

Had Johnson’s Government given even the slimmest of reasons for their action, then the Supreme Court would not have looked to the adequacy of the reason. But the Government gave no reason, and that allowed the court to conclude that the reason for such a lengthy discontinuance was simply to deny Parliament time to carry out its function, and that that was unlawful.

The statement by Johnson that I found most telling was when he said later of his accomplishments, “..we saw off Brenda Hale..” Brenda Hale was the president of the Supreme Court. First, he didn’t see off anyone. He was called on his flagrant trashing of the rules of prorogation. Second, it is boorish to call her by her name and not by her honorific. Third, he and she are part of the system of Government that rules this country, and to trash her personally is to prove his disdain for the laws and the system that hold the country together.

Owen Patterson MP

The second unforced error was to try to overturn the 30 day suspension of Owen Patterson MP after Kathryn Stone, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards of the House of Commons, found him guilty of breaching the paid advocacy rules.

In October 2021 the Commissioner found that Owen Paterson had breached the paid advocacy rules for making three approaches to the Food Standards Agency and four approaches to the Department for International Development in relation to Randox and seven approaches to the Food Standards Agency relating to Lynn’s Country Foods.

The Commissioner said Paterson had “repeatedly used his privileged position to benefit two companies for whom he was a paid consultant, and that this has brought the house into disrepute” and that “no previous case of paid advocacy has seen so many breaches or such a clear pattern of behaviour in failing to separate private and public interests”.

Acting on her report, The Commons Select Committee on Standards recommended that Paterson be suspended from the Commons for 30 sitting days. The Government decided they didn’t like that and voted to overturn the suspension. The uproar that followed resulted in Own Paterson resigning as an MP.

Malicious Slander

The third unforced error was to maliciously slander the Leader of the Opposition Labour Party in the House of Commons.

Munira Mirza is a British political advisor who was the Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit under prime minister Boris Johnson, until she resigned today, 3 February 2022. She resigned because, as she described in her resignation letter, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson knowingly and maliciously slandered the leader of the Opposition with a false claim about his supposed failings when he was Director of Public Prosecutions.

Christopher Pincher MP

The final straw for the members of his Cabinet was when he promoted Christopher Pincher MP, knowing that Mr Pincher was subject to an investigation over sexual assault, and then lying to Parliament saying he was not aware of the allegations and the investigation.

Partygate

And I have not touched on Partygate and the breaches of the rules about meeting during COVID that his Government has laid down and which the population had followed, sometimes resulting in family members not being there to say goodbye to loved ones on their deathbed.