Russia Slowly Throttles a Ukrainian Port

The din of Ukraine’s long, grinding conflict with Russia still rattles windows in the port city of Mariupol, a reminder of a front line frozen for three years just a few miles outside town.

Most worrying for the city’s and Ukraine’s future these days, however, is not the muffled noise of sporadic fighting on the outskirts, but the alarming quiet that has gripped Mariupol’s sprawling port after Russia seized three small Ukrainian naval vessels and 24 sailors last month and began restricting shipping in local waters.

“This is not a joke. It is not a Hollywood movie. It is a very serious situation,” Volodymyr Omelyan, Ukraine’s infrastructure minister, said during a recent visit to the becalmed port on the Sea of Azov, empty of large ships except for a nearly-50-year-old military vessel that serves as the command ship of Ukraine’s puny navy.

Mariupol is now at the center of a combustible struggle between Russia and the West over the future of Ukraine — and over rules that govern the world’s seas. Some believe that Russia, through its Nov. 25 confrontation with the Ukrainian Navy and its subsequent restrictions on shipping, is trying to rewrite the rules in the Sea of Azov, just as China has done in the South China Sea.