The ship’s commander points to the newest warships, Grigorovich and Sviyazhsk, that have emerged on the horizon since Russia occupied Crimea in 2014 and started to expand its Black Sea fleet. Romanian Cmdr. Alexandru Gobjila then points to older vessels, armed with the latest technology and weaponry, including supersonic Kalibr cruise missiles capable of reaching 1,600 miles into Europe.
The Russian Black Sea navy now counts more than 200 large ships, all in a body of water twice the size of the Great Lakes.
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Vladimir Putin’s power projection in the area is meant to secure unfettered warm water access through a war of intimidation waged on the high seas, and President Joe Biden’s detente with Putin may mean American deterrence will be left to NATO’s newest member nations.
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“We are going to assure the security of the lines of communication inside the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, or wherever the alliance requests,” Gobjila said while touring the frigate, named after Romania’s Queen Mary, whose 1919 trip to the Paris Peace Conference consolidated Romania’s international recognition after siding with the Allies in World War I.
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A century later, and 30 years after throwing off the cloak of communism, Romania repeatedly finds itself at the intersection of the world powers, and without the means to go it alone.
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“Romania is on the border of both the EU and NATO alliance,” said Romanian flotilla deputy commander Auras Liviu Coman, who admits his three frigates, each decorated with the NATO star on their sides, do not own modern naval strike missiles.
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“This is a very ambitious project,” Coman announced of an 18-month upgrade plan.
That means the smaller nations of the Black Sea have to rely on a deterrent U.S. and NATO ally presence and their own incremental modernization to ward off Russian aggression.
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The Montreux Convention of 1936 limits the capacity and amount of time foreign navies can spend in the Black Sea. To secure a regular presence of some 100 days per year, the United States is moving destroyers into and out of the Black Sea for 21-day tours that involve multilateral exercises and freedom of navigation missions.
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Whether Biden is prepared to continue that performance in the detente with Russia remains to be seen.
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After achieving a verbal commitment from Putin to reverse his 100,000 troops from the eastern Ukrainian border, it is generally thought that the U.S. in turn canceled the entry of two warships into the Black Sea.
“The Black Sea has always been very strategically important to Russia, going back to Catherine the Great's time,” explained retired Capt. Brent Sadler, a naval analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
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