Kerch Strait closure notice deepens Kyiv's alarm

What was Kyiv responding to as 17 April 2021 arrived? Over the preceding days, a run of events had pushed Ukraine's security concerns in the Donbass and around the Kerch Strait into the same frame.

A rising toll on the front line

On 11 April, a Ukrainian soldier was killed and another seriously wounded by artillery fire from Russian separatist forces on the front line in eastern Ukraine. That brought the number of troops killed in combat that year to 27. On 12 April, two more Ukrainian soldiers died in front-line clashes with separatist forces, both from small arms fire, raising the 2021 total to 29.

An appeal to NATO

Also on 12 April, Ukraine triggered Article 15 of the Charter on a Special Partnership, initiating an emergency meeting with NATO. The stated purpose was to discuss the Russian escalation in Donbass and the build-up of Russian forces on Ukraine's border. The article had last been triggered in 2018, during the Kerch Strait incident.

The Kerch Strait notice

On 15 April, Ukraine protested an alleged Russian announcement that, beginning the following week, it would close the Kerch Strait to foreign warships and state ships until October.

The strait carried particular weight in Kyiv's thinking. On 25 November 2018, the Russian Federal Security Service coast guard fired upon and captured three Ukrainian Navy vessels attempting to pass from the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov on their way to the port of Mariupol. That was the first time Russian forces had openly engaged Ukrainian forces during the Russo-Ukrainian War.

What the sequence showed

By 17 April 2021, three developments stood side by side: soldiers killed along the front line, a formal request for consultations with NATO under a mechanism last used after the 2018 clash, and a protest over a proposed restriction on the strait. The fact that Ukraine had returned to the same NATO mechanism it used after the 2018 incident marked how it viewed the situation in April 2021.