The Black Sea Region, European Security, and Ukraine

The Black Sea basin, though an enclosed, relatively small region, retains major importance for European security in the late 1990s, but the situation there has altered significantly since the late 1980s. Military-political changes in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s diminished the traditionally global dimensions of the Soviet and, prospectively, the Russian naval presence in the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The length of the Russian Federation’s Black Sea coastline has shrunk threefold. Up to 37 per cent of the former Soviet Union’s ship-repairing capabilities lies on the territory of Ukraine (particularly at Nikolaev, Kherson, Kyiv, and Kerch). At the same time, the Black Sea has become the sole outlet to the world’s oceans for an independent Ukraine.