KYIV, Ukraine—Sunday’s Kerch Strait crisis underscored how quickly Russia’s simmering, 4.5-year-old, low-intensity war against Ukraine could escalate into a historic catastrophe.
“Yesterday we were close to war. In fact, war happened,” Capt. Andrii Ryzhenko, the Ukrainian navy’s deputy chief of staff for Euro-Atlantic integration, told The Daily Signal on Monday.
On Sunday, Russian ships fired on and captured three Ukrainian navy vessels approaching the Kerch Strait, a narrow waterway that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov. The three Ukrainian vessels, two artillery boats and a tugboat, were in transit from Odesa to the Ukrainian port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov.
Russian forces reportedly took 24 Ukrainian crew members prisoner during the maritime confrontation. Russia has already tried some of the captured Ukrainians as criminals. Kyiv, however, says the crews should be designated as prisoners of war, subject to the Geneva Conventions.
As of Wednesday, Ukraine’s armed forces remain on full alert. Martial law went into effect on Wednesday morning in 10 Ukrainian regions bordering Russian territory, as well as along the country’s Black Sea and Azov Sea coastlines. Ukrainian regions bordering the breakaway territory of Transnistria in Moldova, where Russia has stationed troops, are also under martial law.
The martial law status is scheduled to last for 30 days, Kyiv says.
Russia, for its part, announced on Wednesday the deployment of additional, advanced S-400 surface-to-air missiles to Crimea, a peninsula that Russia invaded and seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Russia already has three S-400 units deployed and activated in Crimea, according to Russian news reports. Thus, the entirety of Ukraine’s Black Sea and Sea of Azov coastlines remains under the shadow of Russian surface-to-air missiles—a lethal prospect for Ukraine’s air force.
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