this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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The Ukraine war could be ended if Turkey disallowed any Russian ships to go through the bosphorus. And simultaneously Sweden and Denmark block them in the Baltic. Continue to use natural gas from the pipelines, but stop paying for it Musk style.
I'm pretty confident that Turkey has treaty obligations to allow civilian ships through. They can close the Turkish Straits to warships, but not civilian traffic.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_the_Regime_of_the_Straits
So if Russia kicks off a war with Turkey, then Turkey can close it, but only to Russian ships.
And my guess is that a number of countries wouldn't want that kind of precedent. Okay, say the obligation to permit for civilian traffic goes away. Countries can just use the thing as a lever.
What's going to happen?
Like, first there's the other Black Sea countries. But more-broadly, imagine that, say, Egypt decided to use the Suez Canal as a lever against European countries? Europe would probably invade again and just take it to ensure that they could transit the strait. You'd have a lot of major powers that would just invade and seize bodies of water critical to maritime transit so that it wouldn't be used as a lever against them.
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