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Did Trump's Putin cancellation reshape 29 November 2018?
Summary
A look back at the day a planned summit meeting was called off and Kyiv appealed for NATO ships in the Sea of Azov.
What happened to a planned Trump–Putin meeting on 29 November 2018, and why did it hinge on a strait in the Sea of Azov region? The answer runs back to 25 November 2018, when Russia's Federal Security Service coast guard fired upon and captured three Ukrainian Navy vessels in the Kerch Strait. The ships had been trying to pass from the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov on their way to the port of Mariupol, according to later accounts of the incident.
A meeting that was on, then off
On 27 November 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump said he might cancel his scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires because of the maritime clash with Ukraine.
By 29 November 2018 the picture was still unsettled. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the meeting was still on. Trump, flying to Argentina, had said less than an hour earlier that he would probably meet Putin and believed it was a good time to do so. He then tweeted that, after conferring with his top National Security advisers, he had decided to cancel. He said it was not a good time, since Russia had not returned the ships and sailors to Ukraine.
Ports under pressure
The same day, Ukraine's Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan said the ports of Berdiansk and Mariupol were effectively under blockade. According to him, Russia was refusing to let any Ukrainian vessels leave or enter the Sea of Azov.
President Petro Poroshenko called on NATO to send warships to patrol the Sea of Azov.
Elsewhere on the alliance's radar
Also on 29 November 2018, the Belgian Air Component reported on Twitter that, the day before, its F-16s flying in the Baltic region on NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission had intercepted Russian Flanker jets, allegedly because they had no flight plan.
A day of diplomatic signals
Taken together, the reports from 29 November 2018 show how the fate of the captured ships and crews fed directly into top-level diplomacy. Washington tied a leaders' meeting to their return, while Kyiv described its Azov ports as blockaded and asked the alliance for naval patrols.
