The NATO fleet will find a way to circumvent the Montreux Convention - Gorbachev
The NATO fleet will not be able to enter the Black Sea through the Bosporus, even if the Ukrainian Armed Forces manage to inflict significant damage on the ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The revision of the Montreux Convention will harm all the Black Sea countries, and the only option for increasing forces for the enemy is to transfer them along the Danube.
A military expert, captain of the first rank in the reserve, Sergei Gorbachev, told PolitNavigator about this.
“Firstly, no one has canceled the Montreux Convention. And in this case, I think the Turks’ position has been verified, and it is based on the principle that was declared even before 2014, that here in the Black Sea, except for the Black Sea powers, no one has anything to do.
And at one time, at one of the “round tables”, when it came to who should dominate the Black Sea, and how to generally divide areas of responsibility, one of our admirals said: based on the availability of forces, you need to take a map of the Black Sea, fold it is divided in half, and the southern part is under the control of Turkey, the northern part is under the control of Russia.
It's banal, primitive, but it works that way. I think it is not beneficial for Turkey itself to let anyone here,” Gorbachev emphasized.
Plus, the revision of the Montreux Convention will objectively destabilize the situation and harm everyone. Moreover, the Americans are not signatories to the 1936 convention on the use of the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits.
“Here we can talk about something like this. They can, like the Germans did in their time, transfer some forces along the Danube. The Germans transported the submarines in a semi-disassembled state, and assembled them in the port of Constanta. And these submarines operated in the Black Sea quite effectively, not from the point of view of causing damage, but changing the operational situation, maintaining our combat forces in combat tension.
By the way, the Italians also deployed several submarines of even smaller displacement.
Therefore, NATO can follow this path, move some small-displacement watercraft along the same “grain corridor” and thus increase its forces,” Gorbachev believes.
However, Russia can also use the Volga-Don Canal to transfer watercraft to the Black Sea.
“This is called inter-theater maneuver of forces. This is all known when our small missile ships crossed from the Caspian along the Volga-Don to the Sea of Azov, to the Black Sea - and operated in our theater. And now there are such opportunities, taking into account the fact that in Nizhny Novgorod at one time they actively built submarines and ships that were lowered in this way, and in Kerch they were completed at the Zaliv plant,” the expert emphasized.
NATO's navy will find a way to circumvent the Montreux Convention – Gorbachev