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Kyiv's entry ban and the Azov standoff
Summary
A look back at the day Ukraine barred Russian men from entering, amid a blockade of its Azov ports and a cancelled Trump–Putin meeting.
What did Ukraine hope to achieve by barring Russian men of fighting age from the country? On 30 November 2018, as martial law took effect, Kyiv banned Russian men aged between 16 and 60 from entering. President Petro Poroshenko said the measure was meant to prevent the formation of "private armies" in Ukraine. Russia said it did not plan to retaliate.
The trigger in the Kerch Strait
The ban followed the Kerch Strait incident of 25 November 2018, when the Russian Federal Security Service coast guard fired upon and captured three Ukrainian Navy vessels. They had tried to pass from the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov on their way to Mariupol. It was the first time Russian forces had openly engaged Ukrainian forces during the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Ports under pressure
The economic stakes were stated plainly on 29 November 2018. Ukraine's Infrastructure Minister, Volodymyr Omelyan, said the ports of Berdiansk and Mariupol were effectively under blockade, because Russia was refusing to let any Ukrainian vessels enter or leave the Sea of Azov. The same day Poroshenko called on NATO to send warships to patrol the sea.
The entry ban was therefore one element of a wider response. It was a domestic security step, framed by the president in terms of preventing armed groups, while the maritime dispute was being pressed in the language of alliance support.
Diplomacy at the G20
The dispute also reached the margins of the G20 summit in Buenos Aires. On 29 November 2018, while flying to Argentina, US President Donald Trump tweeted that he had cancelled a planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He said that, after conferring with his top National Security advisers, he judged it was not a good time, since Russia had not returned the ships and sailors to Ukraine. Less than an hour earlier, he had said he would probably meet Putin and thought it a good time to do so. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had said earlier that the meeting was still on.
A tense regional backdrop
Elsewhere, NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission reported its own contact with Russia. The Belgian Air Component said on Twitter on 29 November 2018 that Belgian F-16s had intercepted Russian Flanker jets the previous day, allegedly because they had no flight plan.
What the day showed
By 30 November 2018, the response to the Kerch Strait incident was running on several tracks at once: a blockade of Azov ports, an appeal to NATO, a cancelled summit meeting and a border measure targeting Russian men. Russia's statement that it would not retaliate against the entry ban left the maritime dispute, and the detained ships and sailors, as the central unresolved issue.
