Russia appears to back down in territorial dispute in Kerch Strait (10/12/03)

Russia appears to back down in territorial dispute in Kerch Strait

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Russia looks to have backed down from a secretive attempt to construct a dam to reconnect a small peninsula in the Kerch Strait with an island on Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian diplomats called the effort, which is now on hold, an attempt by Moscow to give it leverage in negotiations over delimitation of water boundaries with Kyiv.

In Moscow on October 4 Russia's Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov assured his Ukrainian counterpart, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, that Moscow had no intention of violating Ukraine's territorial integrity or international law by developing a man-made joint to connect the Taman Peninsula with the island of Tuzla.

"I assured [the Ukrainian side] that the work would not violate any existing treaty agreements between the two sides," explained Mr. Ivanov after a meeting with Mr. Gryshchenko, reported Interfax-Ukraine.

In an official reply, the spokesman for Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Markian Lubkivskyi, said it was important that Moscow had finally offered an official explanation and expressed its intention to uphold existing agreements.

"This means that this building effort cannot pierce the line in the Kerch Strait that Ukraine considers its territorial boundary. Of course, Ukraine will continue to monitor the situation in the Tuzla region," explained Mr. Lubkivskyi.

The massive effort to reconnect the peninsula with the island via a 4.5-kilometer dam, which involved hundreds of workers and dozens of earth-moving machinery, first came to the attention of Ukrainian diplomatic and government officials when stories appeared at the end of September in several Moscow newspapers, including Rosiyskii Novyny and Komsomolskaya Pravda.

They described a speedy and somewhat secretive attempt to reconnect the finger-like abutment by building a long dam to the island from the end of the peninsula. Komsomolskaya Pravda went so far as to state that a border point was planned for Tuzla proper, on Ukrainian territory in effect, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin would preside over the ribbon-cutting ceremony that would open it.

Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Ministry maintained an official line which had that the construction project was not supported by Moscow, but initiated as a result of an oversight by officials in Russia's Krasnodar region, to which the Taman peninsula is attached.

After receiving an unconvincing explanation about Russia's intentions from Russia's ambassador to Ukraine, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and then firing off several diplomatic notes to Moscow, to which it did not receive responses, Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Ministry dispatched Assistant Foreign Minister Oleksander Motsyk to find out what was going on.

He returned empty-handed on October 3 to Kyiv, where he told journalists that evidence suggested that the construction of the dam was an attempt by Moscow to obtain a strategic advantage in stalled negotiations on how to divide the Kerch Strait.

"There is an assumption that the Russians are attempting to move the Russian-Ukrainian border beyond the peninsula that would result," explained Mr. Motsyk

The Ukrainian diplomat explained that the waters off Tuzla also are considered Ukrainian territory, and Russia had no right to penetrate a 1-kilometer zone around the island, which is situated 5.5 kilometers (about 3 miles) northwest of the Taman peninsula.

Mr. Motsyk also noted that a Russian-Ukrainian accord from 1994 declared that if any construction or development took place in the Kerch region the other side was to receive advance notification - an agreement that Moscow seemed to have violated with its action.

The island, which was considered part of Russia before being turned over to the Ukrainian SSR in the early 1970s, has little economic, commercial or social significance. The concern was that if the land mass was connected to the Russian-owned Taman Peninsula, which juts into the Kerch Strait, Russia could assert that it had simply reattached what was a historic piece of Russian property. If successful it could have received strategic advantage in its ongoing negotiations over where and even whether there should be a line of delineation between Russia and Ukraine in the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait that connects it to the Black Sea.

Russia would like to see both bodies of water jointly owned by the two countries, which would allow Russia control over access to them. It would also give Russia access to the Ukrainian side, where fish are more abundant and oil might be as well.

The Russian effort to connect Tuzla with the Taman Peninsula, if completed, effectively would have recreated what had existed in nature until 1925, when a series of violent storms swept away a sand and stone spit that had kept the island and the peninsula joined.

Since then the spit has existed only below the surface of the water, with the exception of four points that remain above the water line, none more than 60 hectares in size or 600 meters in width.

President Leonid Kuchma tried to downplay the severity of the situation during comments on October 6 from Yalta, where he was preparing for a summit with leaders of the European Union.

When asked by journalists whether he believed the incident could lead to a border conflict, Mr. Kuchma responded, "I do not accept such a statement. I will never believe that is possible."

Nonetheless, the Ukrainian president voiced his displeasure with Russia's behavior, describing his reaction to the unexpected construction as "negative."

"You know, it is somewhat funny, I look at the map of Russia, but it turns out they still want more," explained Mr. Kuchma in a rare criticism of Moscow.

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