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Trump cancels Putin meeting over Ukrainian ships
Summary
A look back at 29 November 2018, when the Kerch Strait clash reshaped the diplomacy around the G20 summit in Buenos Aires.
What did the Kerch Strait clash change on 29 November 2018? Within days of the incident, it had cost Moscow a planned meeting with Washington and pushed Kyiv to ask NATO for naval help.
The incident occurred on 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 the port of Mariupol. It was the first time Russian forces had openly engaged Ukrainian forces during the Russo-Ukrainian War.
A summit meeting called off
On 27 November, 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. On 29 November, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the meeting was still on. While flying to Argentina, Trump then announced on Twitter that, after conferring with his top National Security advisers, he had decided to cancel it. He said it was not a good time, since Russia had not returned the ships and sailors to Ukraine.
The reversal was abrupt. Less than an hour earlier, Trump had said he would probably meet Putin and that he believed it was a good time to have the meeting.
Ports under pressure
The same day, 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 leave or enter the Sea of Azov. President Petro Poroshenko called on NATO to send warships to patrol the Sea of Azov.
A wider military backdrop
NATO-Russia contacts in the air were also in the news. The Belgian Air Component said on Twitter that Belgian F-16s flying in the Baltic region for NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission had intercepted Russian Flanker jets the previous day, allegedly because the aircraft had no flight plan. The report did not connect this to the Azov events.
What the day showed
Taken together, the developments of 29 November 2018 show the clash feeding directly into high-level diplomacy. The U.S. president tied the fate of a summit meeting to the return of the Ukrainian ships and sailors, while Kyiv framed the Azov situation as a blockade and sought a NATO naval presence.
