MOSCOW — Two crew members on a Turkish-owned vessel were still recovering from their injuries last Thursday when Maria Zakharova stepped before cameras in Moscow and aimed her words not at the fog of war, but at what she called a pattern of deliberate escalation.
The May 29 drone strike on the Turkish ship — a development that drew a formal diplomatic protest from Ankara — was the immediate occasion. But Zakharova, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, used the incident to make a broader argument: that Ukraine has been conducting what she described as “bandit raids” against civilian commercial vessels in the Black Sea using unmanned boats and aerial drones, then attributing responsibility for the attacks to Russia.
“We are concerned about the noticeable escalation of terrorist activity in the Black Sea by the Kiev regime, which leads to a deterioration of conditions and an increase in risks to civilian shipping,” she said in a statement Tuesday.
The accusation landed against a backdrop that has been building for months. On May 28, Ukrainian sea drones struck three tankers linked to Russia’s so-called shadow fleet near Turkey’s northern coast, according to Kyiv Post, which cited Ukraine’s Military Intelligence directorate as saying the vessels were part of Moscow’s network of aging tankers used to circumvent Western sanctions on Russian oil exports. No casualties were reported in that attack. The Turkish coast guard dispatched vessels to the area.
That shadow fleet — which Ukraine’s intelligence services say accounts for as much as 30 percent of Russia’s seaborne oil exports — sits at the center of a strategic and legal argument neither side is resolving cleanly. From Kyiv’s perspective, attacking those tankers is a form of sanctions enforcement at sea. From Moscow’s perspective, and from the position of any captain sailing in international waters, the same vessels are civilian ships.
The legal terrain is not settled. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, deliberate attacks on civilian commercial shipping constitute violations of freedom of navigation. Whether tankers participating in a sanctions-evasion network retain full civilian protection under international law is a question Zakharova did not address — and one that international maritime lawyers have been debating without resolution.
What Zakharova did address, with language calibrated for maximum diplomatic effect, was Turkey’s role. Ankara finds itself in an increasingly uncomfortable position: a NATO member with a Black Sea coastline, a country that has positioned itself as a potential mediator in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and now a state whose own vessels have been struck in waters where the war between Moscow and Kyiv is being conducted partly by drone.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry’s May 29 announcement said Ankara had conveyed its concerns to “the parties” — notably not naming Ukraine. Zakharova welcomed that framing only so far. She called on all coastal states, “which have a special responsibility for ensuring the safety of navigation in the Black Sea,” to publicly condemn what she termed terrorist acts and to push for an impartial investigation.
“We confirm our readiness for close cooperation with Ankara in the interests of finding optimal ways to stabilize the Black Sea water area and exert effective influence on Kiev,” she added.
What that “effective influence” might look like in practice — whether Ankara is willing to apply direct pressure on Kyiv over maritime strikes, and whether that pressure would shift Ukrainian military calculus — Zakharova did not say. Russia has been making variations of this argument since late 2025, when Ukrainian drones struck Gambian-flagged tankers Kairos and Virat in the Black Sea, and again in April when a cargo ship carrying wheat sank in the Sea of Azov after what a Moscow-installed official described as a Ukrainian drone attack.
Ukraine has not officially claimed most of the individual maritime strikes, though its intelligence services have described the shadow fleet campaign in explicit terms. What Kyiv has denied is any role in attacks on genuinely neutral third-country vessels.
That distinction — between sanctioned Russian oil infrastructure at sea and neutral commercial shipping — is one the Black Sea is making harder to maintain by the week. The recent discovery of NATO-made mines on a Turkey-bound gas carrier near Ust-Luga, which Russia cited in a separate incident last month, added another disputed data point to a body of evidence both sides are assembling for competing international narratives.
Zakharova’s statement Tuesday called for the conflict’s “comprehensive settlement” to include the elimination of Black Sea security threats. She did not specify what conditions would constitute such an elimination, nor whether Russia considers its own naval operations in the Black Sea — including missile launches from surface vessels against Ukrainian targets — as separate in character from what it labels Ukrainian terrorism.
That asymmetry sits unacknowledged at the center of every statement out of Moscow on this subject. It is also the gap no coastal state, including Turkey, has yet found a way to bridge.
—Inputs from Sputnik.
