The Black Sea’s Strategic Importance of the and NATO’s Role in Countering the Kremlin’s Military Domination

Abstract

"The Black Sea region has become one of the key geopolitical spaces for the competition between Russia and the West on which the very future of Europe ultimately depends. The Kremlin wants to keep the Black Sea in its sphere of influence through a strategy of regional destabilisation based on a special military operation against Ukraine, the illegal annexation of new territories, historically considered to belong to Russia, and the strengthening of the military presence in these territories or the direct military threat to the states in the region in order to limit as much as possible the possibilities of their accession to the Euro-Atlantic structures. On the other hand, the West is trying to respond to Russia’s expansion with an advanced defence strategy in which the Black Sea occupies a central place. Thus, the Black Sea region, which has traditionally been treated as a less important area, acquires new strategic features becoming a much more militarised, unstable and contested region, a region that is in dire need of a new regional status-quo in order to stabilise. Considering this state of facts, this article has as its main objective the geopolitical analysis of the Black Sea region, given that Russia has become the main destabilising factor in the region, as well as the identification of solutions to achieve regional stability based on the increasingly consistent involvement of the North Atlantic Alliance."