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Black Sea drills and Poland's Afghan exit
Summary
A retrospective on two security developments reported between 28 and 30 June 2021: a large Black Sea exercise and the end of Poland's Afghan deployment.
What did the security picture around Ukraine's region look like on 1 July 2021? Two developments framed it, one at sea and one far to the east.
On 28 June 2021, the Sea Breeze military exercises began in the Black Sea. They were reported as the largest in the exercise's history, a scale that made them the main regional security story of that week.
On 30 June 2021, the last Polish troops left Afghanistan, ending Poland's involvement in the war there. Around 33,000 Polish troops served in Afghanistan over the course of the war, and 44 were killed in action.
Taken together, the two items show NATO-area attention in two directions: a record-scale exercise in the waters off Ukraine's coast, and the closing of a long overseas commitment by Ukraine's western neighbour. Both were under way as 1 July 2021 began.
