The Indispensable Sea: Assessing the EU’s Black Sea Strategy

• Introduction

Emerging international configurations require States and regional organizations to adapt their strategies rapidly, while maintaining prudence and foresight. In this context, the European Union is placing increasing emphasis on enlargement, strategic partnerships, and the development of new networks of cooperation, with the aim of strengthening its geopolitical role in an increasingly unstable international environment.

In this regard, the Black Sea represents a region of strategic relevance for the EU, characterized by both opportunities and vulnerabilities. This large inland sea, located at the heart of Eurasia, constitutes a point of contact among several countries in south-eastern Europe and the wider region, including Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Türkiye and Georgia.

With a surface area of approximately 436,400 km², the basin also plays an important economic role. In particular, marine capture fisheries generate estimated annual revenues of USD 350 million and support more than 20,000 jobs, excluding pre- and post-harvest labour (World Bank Group, 2026). However, in recent decades, the region has been most prominently associated with military operations and international disputes that have destabilized the wider area.

Indeed, the Black Sea has been directly affected by a series of military actions carried out by the Russian Federation: from the occupation of the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, to the occupation and illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, and finally to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched in February 2022.

The EU, which has often remained a reactive rather than proactive actor in the region, has in recent years undertaken a series of actions aimed at strengthening its own security, food security, energy routes, trade corridors, and future enlargement agenda.

In particular, the main programmatic document guiding the EU’s action is the Joint Communication of 28 May 2025, through which the European Commission and the High Representative reaffirmed the centrality of the Black Sea as an essential link with the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Eastern Mediterranean. The Communication organizes the EU’s strategy around three pillars: security, stability, and resilience; sustainable growth and prosperity; and environmental protection, climate resilience, preparedness, and civil protection (European Commission, 2025).

However, in order to achieve these objectives successfully, the EU must confront a multifaceted environment that is not directly controlled by Brussels. The outcome of the war between Russia and Ukraine, Türkiye’s role under the Montreux Convention, the future of the EU accession processes of Ukraine and Moldova, Georgia’s political trajectory, and instability in the South Caucasus all constitute complex challenges which, if not carefully assessed, could trigger further destabilizing dynamics.

In this context, the European Union will therefore need to base its action on a pragmatic and effective approach, capable of involving all relevant stakeholders in order to achieve meaningful and sustainable outcomes.

• The three-pillar framework

At the heart of JOIN (2025) 135 lies a three-pillar architecture designed to structure EU engagement across the full spectrum of regional challenges in the Black Sea region (European Commission, 2025). The first pillar, enhancing security, stability, and resilience, places Ukraine at its centre, reflecting the reality that Black Sea security and European security are now inseparable. The flagship initiative of the Black Sea Maritime Security Hub aims to establish real-time situational awareness from space to seabed, monitor critical maritime infrastructure and build coast guard cooperation across seafront states. Beyond maritime security, the pillar encompasses enhanced military mobility through dual-use infrastructure upgrades, coordinated action against hybrid threats and foreign information manipulation and reinforced cooperation against organized crime and trafficking.

The second pillar, fostering sustainable growth and prosperity, is anchored by the Connectivity Agenda, which seeks to link Europe with Central Asia through transport corridors, green energy links, and digital infrastructure. The Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor (TCTC) sits at its core: trade volumes doubled in 2022 as a direct consequence of Russia’s war disrupting established routes, demonstrating both the strategic need and the market need for viable alternatives. The pillar further targets integrated regional development through blue economy investment, sustainable agriculture, and education and research partnerships.

The third pillar of environmental protection, climate resilience and civil protection responds to a region under severe ecological stress. The Black Sea’s sea surface temperature is rising twice as fast as the North Sea, marine litter is nearly double Mediterranean levels, and Russia’s destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam has inflicted lasting environmental damage. The flagship initiative on coastal preparedness aims to integrate Black Sea partners into EU early warning systems and establish a multi-stakeholder resilience platform for maritime incident response.

Taken together, the framework represents institutional progress: for the first time, the EU consolidates instruments ranging from the Ukraine Facility and the European Peace Facility to Global Gateway and Horizon Europe under a single strategic umbrella. The proposed ministerial format with Black Sea partner countries, with follow-up meetings to monitor progress, signals ambition towards accountability.

Still the architecture carries structural risks. The paper lists diverse financing instruments without prioritization, budget allocation, or a binding monitoring framework. The EU Indo-Pacific Strategy of 2021 offers a cautionary precedent: similarly ambitious in framing, similarly reliant on existing instruments, its operational impact four years on remains limited (European Commission, 2021; Smith and Holland, 2026). More fundamentally, the three pillars contain internal tensions the paper does not resolve: Pillar 1’s security logic sits uneasily with Pillar 2’s investment ambitions in an active conflict zone, while Pillar 2’s Blue Economy expansion directly strains a marine environment already described as critically degraded. A strategy that does not acknowledge or arbitrate its own internal contradictions risks being just an elaborate wish list.

• The Türkiye Problem: Indispensable, Unreliable, Unresolved

Any serious assessment of Europe’s role in the Black Sea has to begin with an uncomfortable fact: the country most central to the region’s stability is also the one over which the EU has the least influence. Türkiye is not a secondary actor in Black Sea geopolitics. It is the gatekeeper. Yet the usual instruments through which Brussels tries to shape the behaviour of neighbouring states no longer work in the Turkish case.

The Montreux Dependency

The starting point is both geographical and legal. Under the 1936 Montreux Convention, Türkiye controls the Turkish Straits, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, which form the only maritime passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. No warship can enter or leave the Black Sea without Ankara’s consent. This gives Türkiye a structural role that no EU initiative can bypass. Maritime security hubs, surveillance drones, and coast guard cooperation can all strengthen Europe’s presence in the region, but they do not alter the basic reality. Any meaningful EU naval role in the Black Sea ultimately depends on Turkish approval.

Since February 2022, Ankara has used this position with considerable diplomatic skill. It invoked the wartime provisions of the Montreux Convention to block the passage of additional Russian warships into the Black Sea, thereby preventing Moscow from reinforcing its fleet. That decision served Western interests and showed that Türkiye was not acting as a simple extension of Russian strategic influence. At the same time, Ankara refused to join Western sanctions, preserved substantial trade with Moscow, and presented itself publicly as a neutral mediator. This is not inconsistency; it is a deliberate strategy. By remaining useful to both sides, Türkiye has maximized its room for manoeuvre in a way that open alignment with either camp would not have allowed. European policymakers have mostly accepted this, continuing to describe Ankara as a partner of strategic importance while avoiding a direct confrontation over the areas of disagreement.

The Collapse of the Accession Framework

The deeper problem is that the EU has lost the main instrument through which it once influenced Turkish domestic and foreign policy: the accession process. During much of the 2000s, the prospect of EU membership encouraged meaningful reforms in Türkiye, including in judicial independence, civilian control over the military, and minority rights protections. That dynamic largely collapsed in the mid-2010s. By 2018, accession negotiations were effectively frozen, after the EU’s General Affairs Council concluded that Türkiye was moving further away from the European Union. In May 2025, the European Parliament reaffirmed this position with 367 votes in favour, arguing that Ankara’s democratic backsliding, including the detention of Istanbul’s mayor and the erosion of judicial independence, made any resumption of talks impossible under current conditions. According to the European Commission’s 2024 Turkey Report, Türkiye’s alignment with the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy stood at only 5% in 2024.

This has major implications for Black Sea policy. Enlargement is the EU’s most powerful tool for reshaping the behaviour of neighbouring states. In the cases of Ukraine and Moldova, the accession process gives Brussels a structured framework based on conditionality, benchmarks, and political momentum. That framework creates real leverage. With Türkiye, however, it is effectively dead. What remains is a more transactional relationship built around migration cooperation, customs union arrangements, and occasional security dialogue. These tools still matter, but they do not have the transformative force of accession conditionality. The result is a relationship in which the EU needs Türkiye more than Türkiye needs the EU, at least in the Black Sea context. Both sides are aware of this imbalance.

The Shadow Fleet Contradiction

Perhaps the sharpest illustration of this structural tension is Russia’s shadow fleet. Since 2022, Moscow has assembled an extensive network of ageing, underinsured tankers to circumvent Western sanctions on its oil exports. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, by mid-2025 the fleet comprised around 940 unique vessels, representing approximately one sixth of the entire global tanker market. The fleet facilitates an estimated 65% of Russia’s seaborne oil trade, transporting around 3.7 million barrels per day and generating, according to a CSIS brief by Jensen and Macias, between $87 and $100 billion in annual revenue. That same analysis found that this figure has matched or exceeded the total value of Western military and economic assistance to Ukraine since the start of the war.

Türkiye sits at the heart of this architecture. According to the CSIS brief, it is one of the largest buyers of Russian seaborne crude, importing around 425,000 barrels per day. Turkish refineries process Russian crude and then export the resulting products to other markets, while Turkish intermediaries have provided logistical and financial services that keep the shadow network operational. The EU has publicly called on Ankara to play a „constructive role” in countering these operations. But there is no conditionality attached to this request, no incentive structure that would make compliance in Türkiye’s interest, and no enforcement mechanism that could compel it. It is, in essence, a diplomatic appeal directed at a partner that has concrete economic reasons to maintain the status quo.

What Remains Unresolved

The EU’s caution is understandable. Openly confronting Türkiye could damage cooperation with a partner that remains essential to any serious European strategy in the Black Sea. But this caution also creates a problem. It leaves the EU’s approach analytically vague and strategically incomplete. Türkiye is indispensable but misaligned, formally still a candidate country but functionally treated as a third country. This contradiction is not new. What is new is the scale of Europe’s ambition in the Black Sea, and the extent to which that ambition depends on a relationship that the EU has not yet found a way to stabilize.

• Russia/Ukraine and the Southern Caucasus

The EU’s policies of economic and military support for Ukraine also play a crucial role from the perspective of the Black Sea. The outcome of the Russia Ukraine war will be decisive for the process of regional stabilization, which can be fully consolidated only if there is a lasting reduction in hostilities. The Black Sea basin is currently one of the areas in which Russian influence is most directly exercised, through military, economic, energy related and political pressure on the states of the region. These dynamics undermine the domestic stability of the countries concerned and generate spillover effects on the stability of neighbouring states.

While this growing instability constitutes a threat to European security, it also offers the EU, NATO and Western partners an opportunity to strengthen strategic deterrence at a time when the Russian Federation is facing significant difficulties. In this respect, the Black Sea has emerged as a key node in Russia’s project of global power projection. The containment or, conversely, the failure to contain Russian influence opens up different scenarios, each with significant implications for the future of the European geopolitical order (European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2024).

A scenario in which the current situation persists would result in the maintenance of an unstable status quo: Europe would remain constrained in its capacity for strategic action; Russia would retain significant, albeit not fully consolidated, regional influence; and Ukraine would continue to devote a substantial share of its efforts to preserve access to the Black Sea, particularly through Odesa. The loss of Odesa would represent a particularly serious turning point, as it would deprive Kyiv of its principal maritime outlet and significantly increase Moldova’s vulnerability, exposing it to even more direct Russian pressure (Chatham House, 2025).

The worst case scenario would be one in which Russia succeeds in gaining full control of the region. At present, however, this outcome appears unlikely, in light of both the limited pace of Russia’s advance in Donbas and the difficulties Moscow has encountered in consolidating its maritime dominance. A scenario of gradual stabilization appears more plausible, although it remains subject to multiple uncertainties. It is precisely here that the limits of the European strategy become apparent: while the EU recognizes the centrality of the Black Sea, it has not yet defined with sufficient clarity how it intends to act in response to the different possible outcomes of the war.

What is clear is that Europe is adopting a multidimensional approach, in which military security, economic stability, institutional resilience and regional connectivity are understood as interdependent dimensions. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that control of the Black Sea is not solely a matter of the military balance between Moscow and Kyiv but directly affects the EU’s ability to develop a credible security and connectivity strategy towards the South Caucasus and Central Asia. In this sense, Ukraine’s resilience in the Black Sea basin, and in particular the preservation of access to Odesa and the surrounding maritime routes, is an essential condition for preventing Russia from turning the region into a closed space under its own influence.

At the same time, the South Caucasus constitutes the second critical axis of the EU’s strategy in the Black Sea region. The region represents the natural landward extension of the basin towards the Caspian Sea and Central Asia, but it remains marked by political fragility, unresolved tensions and competition among external actors. In this context, Georgia represents one of the principal uncertainties. Although it was granted candidate country status in 2023, its European path has progressively weakened due to domestic democratic backsliding and the government’s decision to suspend the accession process until 2028 (European Council, 2026). This reduces the EU’s ability to build a stable corridor linking the Black Sea, the Caucasus and Central Asia, since Tbilisi remains an essential geographic node but an increasingly unpredictable political actor.

Armenia, by contrast, is acquiring a growing role within Europe’s projection towards the Caucasus. The first EU Armenia Summit, held in Yerevan on 4 and 5 May 2026, marked a significant political step, placing the partnership with Yerevan within a broader strategy of cooperation on connectivity, energy, transport, digital affairs, security and regional stability (European Council, 2026; Eunews, 2026). However, stronger relations with Armenia are not sufficient, on their own, to ensure the stabilization of the South Caucasus. The normalization process between Armenia and Azerbaijan remains fragile: the initialling of the peace treaty in August 2025 represents an important step forward, but full stabilization will depend on its signature, ratification and implementation, as well as on the effective opening of regional communications.

In this respect, the main limitation of European action lies in the disproportion between strategic ambition and political leverage. The EU possesses significant economic, diplomatic and regulatory instruments, but the security of the Black Sea and the South Caucasus still depends on external variables: the evolution of the Russia Ukraine war, the preservation of Ukraine’s access to Odesa, Georgia’s political orientation, the stability of the Armenia Azerbaijan peace process, and the behaviour of other international actors, including Russia, Türkiye and the United States.

Current status of the Ukrainian conflict and Russian occupation in the Black Sea region. Updated May 13, 2026. Via DeepState. Available at: deepstatemap.live

• The Black Sea as a Global Gateway

Strategic Corridor Bypassing Russia

The Black Sea occupies a structurally unique position in the emerging geography of Eurasian trade. It is not merely a regional sea. It is the westernmost terminal of the Trans Caspian International Transport Route, also known as the Middle Corridor, a multimodal network of rail, road, and maritime links spanning over 4,250 kilometres from western China through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian Sea, through Azerbaijan and Georgia, and into Europe via Turkish ports and the Black Sea basin. The Middle Corridor is the shortest overland route between western China and Europe, compared both to the Northern Corridor through Russia and to maritime lanes through the Suez Canal.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 acted as a structural accelerant for this corridor. The sanctioning of Russian transit infrastructure, the disruption of Black Sea commercial lanes, and the progressive delegitimization of logistics networks centred on Moscow forced European and Asian actors alike to seek alternatives. According to Emil Avdaliani writing in the Diplomatic Courier, over the first eleven months of 2024, 4.1 million tons of cargo moved through the corridor, representing a 63% increase compared with the previous year. As recently as November 2025, EU Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos stated at the TITR Investors Forum in Tashkent that cargo along the Middle Corridor has grown four times between 2022 and today and could triple again by 2030 if the right investments are made.

The EU’s financial commitment reflects this strategic priority. At the Investors Forum for transport connectivity between the EU and Central Asia in January 2024, the European Commission announced a pledge of €10 billion for the Trans Caspian International Transport Route, followed by a further €12 billion Global Gateway investment package at the first EU-Central Asia Summit in Uzbekistan in April 2025, according to the summit factsheet published by the European Commission. Yet as Löwenhardt has argued in a DGAP policy brief, this agenda will only succeed if funding becomes more targeted, compatible with climate objectives, and grounded in effective collaboration. Persistent bottlenecks remain, particularly at Caspian ferry terminals and border crossing points, logistical chokepoints that no investment pledge alone can resolve quickly.

There are also structural vulnerabilities that go beyond infrastructure. As the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has warned, Georgia’s paralysis over the Anaklia port project, geopolitical volatility in the South Caucasus, and the environmental degradation of the Caspian Sea constrain future throughput to a fraction of what a full alternative to the Northern Route would require. According to research published in the Journal of Transport Geography by Van der Linde and colleagues, the surface of the Caspian Sea is dropping by up to 30 centimetres annually, already affecting ferry operations and potentially undermining the corridor’s core crossing segment. For the EU, this means that the Black Sea as a gateway is not a geopolitical asset that can operate by itself. It is a strategic bet requiring sustained political investment and careful management of cascading regional risks.

Critical Raw Materials: The Real Stakes

Underlying the connectivity agenda is a supply chain imperative that rarely receives the prominence it deserves in public debate. The EU’s green and digital transitions depend on a set of critical raw materials, including lithium, cobalt, manganese, titanium, and rare earth elements, whose reserves are concentrated in Central Asia and whose access requires a stable overland corridor that avoids Russia and terminates in the Black Sea. According to the factsheet published by the European Commission following the EU-Central Asia Summit in April 2025, over the past seven years trade between the two regions has quadrupled, reaching €54 billion, with energy and raw materials accounting for a large share.

This dimension reframes the entire strategic conception of the Black Sea corridor. The route is not merely about moving container traffic more efficiently. It is about restructuring European industrial supply chains away from both Russian dependency and excessive reliance on maritime routes dominated by China. The Black Sea, in this sense, becomes a chokepoint of European strategic autonomy, the point at which raw materials from the Kazakh steppe, Uzbek mines, and Azerbaijani pipelines either enter European markets or do not.

China’s Shadow: The Belt and Road Already There

The EU’s Black Sea strategy unfolds in a theatre where China has already been building influence for years. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, explicitly identified the South Caucasus as a central node of its China-Central Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor. Georgia, given its location on the Black Sea coast, was identified as the connection point to Europe, and Chinese diplomatic and economic engagement with Tbilisi, Baku, and Yerevan has intensified steadily since. According to Shirinov writing in Caucasus Watch, by mid-2023 China had signed more than 200 Belt and Road cooperation agreements with over 150 countries, and cumulative trade between China and its Belt and Road partners had reached $19.1 trillion.

The trajectory of Chinese engagement with the Caucasus has accelerated sharply since 2022. As Shirinov documents, in July 2024 President Xi Jinping and Azerbaijani President Aliyev upgraded bilateral relations to a strategic partnership, pledging to expand cooperation in trade, investment, energy, and infrastructure, including development of the Trans Caspian International Transport Corridor. In April 2025, Azerbaijan elevated its ties with China to a comprehensive strategic partnership, accompanied by a new multimodal transport agreement designed to smooth customs and cargo flows along the TITR; at the same time, China committed to enhancing Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea ports and advancing the long-delayed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway. These developments signal the emergence of an almost continuous corridor stretching from China’s western frontier to the Black Sea.

Crucially, Beijing’s engagement with the Middle Corridor is not simply reactive to Western pressure. It is proactive infrastructure statecraft. China is not merely responding to geopolitical shifts but is actively using the corridor to redefine its role in a multipolar world, diversifying trade routes and reducing dependency on maritime chokepoints like the Suez Canal. At the October 2023 Belt and Road Forum, President Xi Jinping pledged to participate in the Trans Caspian International Transport Corridor and to develop new logistics links across Eurasia.

The strategic implication for the EU is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The same corridor that Brussels is funding as a vector of strategic autonomy is simultaneously being integrated into Beijing’s own connectivity architecture. The transit countries along the route, including Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, are not passive recipients of European largesse. They are active geopolitical balancers, managing relationships with Brussels, Washington, Beijing, and Moscow at the same time. As Ribeiro has noted in the CEBRI Journal, Baku’s political strategy has been to balance carefully between major powers while presenting itself as a reliable energy and logistics partner. For the EU, this means that investment in the corridor does not automatically translate into political alignment. Influence must be earned through consistent engagement, not merely purchased through infrastructure pledges.

The Black Sea, in sum, is the intersection of three overlapping competitive dynamics: the EU’s drive for strategic autonomy from Russia; China’s ambition to anchor Eurasian connectivity within its own institutional framework; and the transit states’ rational pursuit of multipolarity. Whether this convergence produces a stable gateway based on rules or a contested geopolitical flashpoint will depend not only on the infrastructure built, but also on the governance frameworks established, the institutional ties deepened, and the durability of European commitment well beyond the immediacy of the war in Ukraine.

• Conclusion

The EU’s Black Sea strategy marks genuine institutional progress, but ambition and capacity remain misaligned. Three structural problems persist: the three-pillar framework contains internal contradictions it does not resolve; the Türkiye relationship is indispensable yet without credible leverage; and the corridor strategy underpinning Global Gateway is more contested than Brussels acknowledges, as transit states pursue multipolarity rather than alignment.

The strategy’s success will ultimately depend on variables outside EU control: the war’s trajectory, Georgia’s political direction, and the durability of the Armenia-Azerbaijan process. What the Union can determine is the coherence and consistency of its own engagement. A strategy that honestly acknowledges its contradictions will outlast one built on ambition alone. The Black Sea demands sustained presence, not periodic attention.

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