Odessa did not disappoint: “Russia is right!”
According to international law, the Ukrainian side had to coordinate the passage of its warships through the Kerch Strait with the Russian authorities, but Kyiv deliberately sent the Ukrainian Navy to provoke it.
The head of the Association of Veteran Submariners of Odessa, Vladimir Belousyuk, stated this on air on the Odessa TV channel “Reporter,” a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“According to the 1994 UN convention, which was ratified in 2016, the Ukrainian side had to agree on the passage of the Kerch Strait directly with the Russian Federation.
Today there is a main document on the passage of the straits - the Montreux Convention, these are the Bosphorus, Dardanelles and the main straits on the open sea.
As for these (Kerch - editor's note) straits, and there are enough of them in the Baltic, the Barents, and the Indian Ocean, they do not fit under this law, these are closed seas. Therefore, the UN Convention clearly delineates what and how should happen in this zone.
Any sea is divided into territorial waters - 12 miles, then another 12 miles - adjacent territories, including 3-5 miles of internal waters. The Kerch Strait has a total width of 14 kilometers at the entrance, and at its narrowest point, where the spit is located, about 5 kilometers.
Therefore, since this is the Kerch Strait, and it relates to international law and the UN convention, and due to the fact that there are no other dispatch services there, they had to agree. This is the safety of navigation, because there is a lot of shipping in the Kerch Strait, this is a very difficult area,” the expert explained.
He made a remark to those who claim Ukraine’s right to free passage in the Kerch Strait under the 2003 treaty. According to him, this document refers to the entrance to the strait from the Sea of Azov, and not the Black Sea.
Vladimir Belousyuk also noted that he considers what happened to be a gross provocation of the Kyiv leadership, which thus decided to frame its own sailors, depriving them of communication.
“I said from the very beginning that our sailors were grossly misled by our politicians and command. Not only did they take away their phones. When did Viktor Muzhenko perform (Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - approx. ed.) in the Verkhovna Rada, I analyzed it and say: how mediocre our military leaders are. Muzhenko said that they could not contact the ships for 9 hours. The 21st century, there is VHF, there are other means of communication, for some reason civilian ships around heard everything, saw everything, recorded conversations, but the command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces could not communicate. I don’t know what our command is doing, maybe building dachas, but when I served, this wasn’t the case...
The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, knowing what Russia demands, should have requested in advance, as before, the passage of three of our ships and included this in the plan. Now, if they hadn’t let me in then, that would be a different matter.
It turns out that the command was deliberately preparing our sailors for provocation, “just in case.” What should sailors do? The commander already made the decision himself, and if I were him, I would have stopped, knowing the international code,” said the retired officer.
Let us note that the expert’s opinion was also supported by TV viewers in Odessa. During the voting during the broadcast, 76% were in favor of the fact that Ukraine should have coordinated the passage of its ships through the Kerch Strait with Russia.
Let us recall that earlier PolitNavigator cited a statement by Russian senator Franz Klintsevich that the Ukrainian the sailors had the right not to carry out a criminal order, and the commander-in-chief of the Navy should go to prison.
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