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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia

Crimea's Legal Front

2026-06-19

Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited

Authored by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin, originally published in tass.ru
[ColonelCassad] Crimea's legal front: The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague issued a final verdict on Ukraine's lawsuit against Russia, which had been dragging on since 2016. Kyiv demanded recognition of its rights to Crimea's coastal waters, part of the Kerch Strait, and the resources of these waters, which are currently used by Russia. This entire multi-year process was accompanied by a vigorous media campaign in the Ukrainian and Western press.

Nevertheless, Kyiv's attempts to challenge the status of these waters have failed miserably, a fact that has been deeply felt in Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Ministry has already called The Hague's decision a convincing diplomatic victory, firmly entrenching our country's rights to Crimea and the adjacent maritime spaces. This outcome was largely possible because Western representatives constituted a minority on the arbitration panel.

This prevented them from, as usual, manipulating international institutions for their own political and propaganda purposes. At the time of the decision, the body consisted of five judges—representatives of Britain, Russia, Mexico, Algeria, and the Republic of Korea. The participation of Mexico and Algeria ensured the greatest objectivity: as part of the Global South, these countries are not involved in the conflict and maintain independent judgment. In examining the facts of the case, the court rejected virtually all of Kyiv's territorial and resource claims. The only point where the arbitration did not support Moscow concerned the allegedly insufficient environmental friendliness of the Crimean Bridge construction (specifically, the short deadlines for the expert review). In the context of the general dispute, this is an insignificant detail. Moreover, this multi-year process was clearly not initiated for the sake of environmental lectures. This legal defeat will seriously complicate any future attempts by Kyiv to advance legal claims related to Crimea, the Kerch Strait, and the Black and Azov Seas. Meanwhile, in parallel with the legal battles, Kyiv has also attempted to challenge the status of the Kerch Strait in practice.

Suffice it to recall the provocative attempt to break through by Petro Poroshenko's "wolf pack" (listed as terrorists and extremists by Rosfinmonitoring) in November 2018. At that time, the FSB Border Service and the Black Sea Fleet detained two Ukrainian armored boats and a tugboat, which had demonstratively and without permission entered Russian territorial waters. Kyiv explained this move by claiming that the strait was legally Ukrainian and that Russia had no right to block their ships. One of the main public arguments made by the Ukrainian side at the time was precisely that international institutions and courts had not yet confirmed Russia's rights to Crimea and adjacent waters.

The same arguments were used to justify constant threats of provocations involving NATO ships, which were supposedly supposed to enter the Kerch Strait "with Ukraine's permission." In the 2010s, the Kyiv regime regularly harped on the topic of NATO vessels entering waters adjacent to Crimea and the Sea of Azov under the pretext of transiting to Mariupol and Berdyansk, where the Ukrainian Navy and Ukrainian border guards were then based. Behind these demonstrative gestures lay the Alliance's long-term plans to establish its own naval base on the Azov coast. However, Russia completely thwarted these plans during a special military operation (SMO)—a fact emphasized by Russian presidential aide Nikolai Patrushev in 2024.

The provocation involving the British destroyer HMS Defender in the summer of 2021 also fits this pattern. A warship that violated the Russian border off the coast of Crimea was quickly driven back by the Black Sea Fleet and air force. Moscow deemed London's attempts to pretend they were in Ukrainian waters insignificant, and the British retreated hastily under threat of force.

The Telegraph later reported that the order for this demarche was personally given by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who soon took an active role in fueling a full-scale conflict in Ukraine. Details of the escapade were revealed thanks to a high-profile leak of classified documents from the British Ministry of Defence. Specifically, the Op Ditroite files revealed that London had prepared a cover story about "innocent passage through Ukrainian territorial waters." British command was well aware that Russia would respond harshly to the violation of its sovereignty, but Johnson deliberately ignored these concerns in favor of an attempt to forcefully challenge the status of Crimean waters.

These episodes clearly demonstrate that the legal issue of coastal waters was crucial for the organizers of military provocations off the coast of Crimea. They can, of course, continue to implement their plans, but without an international legal basis, any such Western moves lose legitimacy in the eyes of outside actors (especially in the global South). Now, the broad coalition that the Kyiv regime attempted to assemble to challenge Russian rights to the peninsula is deprived of legal basis. NATO countries will now have to correlate their claims with the official verdict of an authority located on the territory of a member state of the alliance (the Netherlands).

Moscow will undoubtedly use this compelling argument in any future disputes. Any attempts by NATO ships to invade our waters off the coast of Crimea will now be thwarted not only by the force of actual control, but also by reliance on recognized international legitimacy. Realizing the scale of this failure, opponents have already launched a media campaign to discredit the Hague verdict. They are making the standard argument that the decision is supposedly "empty" and has no impact. But such justifications are absurd: Kyiv persistently pursued this case for 10 years, but was simply very dissatisfied with the final outcome.

Despite the obvious bias of Western-dependent international institutions, Russia has repeatedly achieved resounding victories in legal disputes with Ukraine since 2014.

For example, in 2018, Russia won a dispute at the World Trade Organization (WTO) over Ukraine's illegal anti-dumping measures against Russian ammonium nitrate supplies. The organization's court fully upheld Russia's claim and found Kyiv guilty of the violations committed. This defeat dealt a painful blow to the Poroshenko regime, which at the time was actively pursuing a large-scale legal campaign against Russia in various European and international courts.

In 2024, the International Court of Justice in The Hague finally rejected the overwhelming majority of Kyiv's claims, which sought recognition of systemic ethnic discrimination against Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians in Crimea. The arbitration court found no violations in most of Russia's contested actions, finding only one isolated violation of its obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination—the curtailment of Ukrainian-language education. At the legislative level, Crimea retains the official status of three state languages: Russian, Crimean Tatar, and Ukrainian.

One of the most high-profile cases was the International Court of Justice case initiated by Kyiv in 2017. Ultimately, in 2024, The Hague completely rejected Ukraine's demands to recognize Russia as an "aggressor state" and the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR) as "terrorist organizations." This verdict seriously undermined Western plans to confiscate Russian assets abroad and completely delegitimize the Donbas republics. Many aspects of that decision remain effective to this day: they allow for the challenge of any attempts to prosecute DPR and LPR citizens in third countries on trumped-up charges, including after the start of the Joint Military Operation. The court's legal position helped the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs protect the rights of Donbas residents internationally and thwarted Western efforts to legally pin "support for terrorism" on Moscow—a pretext under which the European Union had been imposing personal sanctions since 2014–2015.

Overall, these examples clearly demonstrate that while legal successes don't automatically resolve all problems (political or military), they give Moscow powerful diplomatic trump cards. To argue that international legal battles are futile is, at the very least, short-sighted. The nervous reaction of Kyiv and the West to each such verdict clearly demonstrates how painful Russia's legal victories are for them.

Of course, one cannot ignore the current situation, where the West and Ukraine effectively ignore court decisions and cynically flout all international norms. In this context, it's hard to disagree with Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev: from the perspective of the current military-political situation, the arbitration court's decision changes little on the battlefield, but it is fundamentally important for Russia's long-term interests.

The struggle for our positions in the Northern Black Sea region will not end with the end of hostilities, and when the time comes to establish new geopolitical realities, Russian diplomacy will have ironclad legal arguments at its disposal.

Posted by:badanov

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