Why a narrow Black Sea deal may be easier than a broader peace agreement

A smaller agreement asks for smaller concessions

Maria Daria Bobirc, a graduate student in Political Science, now pursuing a master’s degree in Diplomacy and International Negotiations at SNSPA, sees an important difference between negotiating over navigation and negotiating over the war itself.

Territory and security guarantees are not issues either side can easily detach from the conflict. Shipping is different.

A limited maritime arrangement can separate grain transport, commercial traffic and crew safety from the political questions that remain completely blocked. That matters because the concessions involved are not of the same kind.

Russia could refrain from attacks on commercial vessels without changing its position on territory or on the wider war. Ukraine could accept measures protecting civilian navigation without giving up its broader military objectives.

Neither side would have to present the arrangement as a strategic retreat.

That does not make an agreement easy. It makes the object of negotiation smaller, clearer and easier to verify.

There is already a precedent.

The Black Sea Grain Initiative, agreed in 2022, allowed food and fertiliser exports from three Ukrainian ports while the war continued. Its implementation was supported through a Joint Coordination Centre in Istanbul bringing together representatives of Ukraine, Russia, Türkiye and the United Nations. The initiative was not renewed after its third term expired in July 2023.

Its record cuts both ways.

It showed that two states fighting a war can still cooperate around one narrow practical interest. It also showed how quickly that cooperation can disappear once one side decides the arrangement is no longer worth preserving.

Türkiye's advantage is also its limitation

Few countries can still talk to both Moscow and Kyiv without immediately losing access to one of them. Türkiye can.

That gives Ankara an unusually useful position.

It is a Black Sea state, controls passage through the Turkish Straits under the Montreux Convention, belongs to NATO and has maintained working relations with both sides throughout the war.

For Maria, this makes Türkiye both important and constrained.

Ankara can speak to Moscow and Kyiv in ways many other NATO states cannot. That gives it access and a degree of acceptability in both capitals.

But the same relationships also limit how far Türkiye can go.

A mediator that depends on maintaining contact with both parties cannot push either one too hard without risking the access that makes mediation possible in the first place.

That is why Türkiye is better placed to facilitate than to enforce.

It can bring parties together, suggest mechanisms and keep channels open. It cannot by itself guarantee that either side will respect an agreement once the political cost of doing so begins to rise.

Türkiye also has more at stake than diplomatic prestige.

Its ships, companies and commercial interests are directly exposed to instability in the Black Sea. The strike on a Turkish-owned vessel near Novorossiysk made that vulnerability particularly visible.

For Ankara, safer navigation is therefore not only a diplomatic objective. It is also a practical national interest.

The harder part begins after an agreement is signed

For Maria, the real problem starts after the announcement.

A moratorium matters only if the parties can determine when it has been violated and what happens next.

The first requirement is verification.

If a vessel, port or agreed route is attacked, someone has to establish what happened. That could mean agreed navigation corridors, satellite surveillance or another monitoring mechanism capable of producing information both sides can use.

The Black Sea Grain Initiative offers one useful precedent. Its Joint Coordination Centre gave the arrangement an operational structure rather than leaving implementation entirely to political promises.

The second requirement is communication.

Maria points to the need for a direct military channel. In a contested maritime environment, one incident can quickly be interpreted as proof that the entire deal has collapsed.

A functioning line of communication, directly or through an intermediary, could help answer a basic question before escalation begins: was this a deliberate abandonment of the agreement, or an isolated breach?

Then comes proportionality.

If every violation automatically produces the maximum response, the arrangement becomes almost impossible to preserve.

The parties would need some understanding in advance of how incidents are investigated, how responsibility is established and what kind of response follows.

“The real test of a Black Sea agreement would not be whether it can be signed, but whether it can survive its first violation.”

That is the harder part.

A maritime deal would need rules not only for compliance, but also for failure. Without them, one disputed incident could be enough to bring the whole arrangement down.

A deal without rapprochement

None of this would mean that Russia and Ukraine were moving closer to a broader political settlement.

They would not have to.

A maritime agreement could exist while their fundamental positions on the war remained incompatible.

That is precisely the point.

A narrow deal asks a smaller question: is there one area where continued disruption costs both sides more than limited cooperation does?

That is a much more modest ambition than ending the war.

It is also easier to define and test.

The Black Sea Grain Initiative showed that compartmentalised cooperation can work during an active conflict. Its eventual end showed the limits of that model.

Any new arrangement would have to learn from both.

The central question is not whether trust between Russia and Ukraine has returned. It has not.

The more realistic question is whether civilian navigation can be separated from the wider conflict enough for both sides to conclude that compliance is less costly than continued disruption.

If that threshold can be reached, a Black Sea agreement would not mean peace is close.

It would mean something narrower, but still useful: even when the biggest political questions remain blocked, there may still be room to negotiate the smaller ones.

Expert contribution

This analysis draws on a written exchange with Maria Daria Bobirc, a graduate student in Political Science, now pursuing a master’s degree in Diplomacy and International Negotiations at SNSPA. Her views are attributed throughout the article.