Published: August 27, 2008
Courtesy Of The New York Times
MOSCOW — Russian commanders said Wednesday that they were growing alarmed at the number of NATO warships sailing into the Black Sea, saying that NATO vessels now outnumbered the ships in their fleet anchored off the western coast of Georgia.Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Paris.
As attention turned to the balance of naval power in the sea, the leader of the separatist region of Abkhazia said he would invite Russia to establish a naval base at Sukhumi, a deep-water port in the territory.
But in a move certain to anger Russia, Ukraine’s president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, said he would open negotiations with Moscow on raising the rent on the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, which is in Crimea, a predominantly Russian province of Ukraine.
The United States was pursuing a delicate policy of delivering humanitarian aid on military transport planes and ships, apparently to illustrate to the Russians that they do not fully control Georgia’s airspace or coastline.
The policy has left American and Russian naval vessels maneuvering in close proximity off the western coast of Georgia, with the Americans concentrated near the southern port of Batumi and the Russians around the central port of Poti. It has also left the Kremlin deeply suspicious of American motives.
“What the Americans call humanitarian cargoes — of course, they are bringing in weapons,” President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia told the BBC in an interview on Tuesday, adding, “We’re not trying to prevent it.”
The White House dismissed all assertions that the Pentagon was shipping weapons under the “guise” of humanitarian aid, as the state-controlled news media put it, calling them “ridiculous.”
Apparently testing Russian assurances that their forces have opened the port of Poti for humanitarian aid, the United States Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, said a Coast Guard cutter, the Dallas, would try to dock there on Wednesday, well within a zone controlled by the Russian military during the war.
The Dallas, however, docked instead at Batumi, to the south. It was carrying 34 tons of humanitarian aid. Georgian military officials said the other port might have been mined, The Associated Press reported.
During the conflict with Georgia, Russian soldiers occupied the port of Ponti and sank Georgian ships in the harbor. Russian officials have said that their forces are now out of the city, but that they are still occupying positions at checkpoints just to the north. Russian ships are also patrolling off the coast.
NATO on Wednesday called on Russia to reverse its decision to recognize two rebel Georgian regions and urged it to respect Georgia’s territorial integrity.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said in a speech to the French diplomatic corps that no one wanted another cold war and called on Russia to pull back its forces to positions they held before the current conflict with Georgia.
“NATO is not an adversary but a partner of Russia,” he added. “As for the European Union, it seeks to build with this country a close and positive relation. It is for Russia today to make a fundamental choice.”
Russia continued to dismiss Western criticism, with Mr. Medvedev defending Russia’s actions as necessary to protect against a “genocide” by the Georgian armed forces in South Ossetia. In Moscow, the agriculture minister, Aleksei Gordeyev, told reporters that Russia could cut poultry and pork import quotas by hundreds of thousands of tons, the news agency Itar-Tass said.
The Kremlin also kept up efforts to build support for its actions in Georgia, although with little result. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry broke a long silence from Beijing by saying that China was concerned about “the latest development in South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” Agence-France Presse reported.
And the Russian ambassador to Macedonia told reporters that he had asked the authorities there to recognize the two breakaway Georgian regions, though Russia has pledged not to force any states to recognize them. Macedonia itself broke away from Yugoslavia, when that country disintegrated in the 1990s.
In Moscow, the naval maneuvering was clearly raising alarms. Russian commanders said the buildup of NATO vessels in the Black Sea violated a 1936 treaty, the Montreux Convention, which they maintain limits to three weeks the time noncoastal countries can sail military vessels on the sea.
Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, said at a briefing in Moscow that under the agreement, Turkey, which controls the straits of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, must be notified 15 days before military ships sail into the sea, and that warships could not remain longer than 21 days.
“The convention stipulates a limited number of vessels,” he said. “That is, the same state cannot deploy a certain group without any limit.”
He said any sustained NATO deployment would require rotating ships through the straits.
It was unclear on Wednesday how many NATO ships were currently in the Black Sea.
A spokesman at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, in Mons, Belgium, said there were four NATO warships there on a previously scheduled exercise called Active Endeavor, for training in antiterrorist and anti-pirate maneuvers. But he cautioned that other NATO countries could have ships in the sea not operating under NATO command.
“Obviously, there are other NATO-affiliated nations out doing things,” Lt. Col. Web Wright, the spokesman, said. “But I can’t speak for those nations.”
The United States guided missile destroyer McFaul, for example, docked over the weekend in Batumi to deliver humanitarian aid. A report by the Russian news agency Interfax cited this ship, along with three others, as operating in the sea, though it was unclear whether it referred to vessels taking part in the previously scheduled exercise.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 28, 2008, on page A16 of the New York edition.
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