Black Sea Insecurity, Türkiye, and the Political Risks to Maritime Trade and Security
The Black Sea is strategically vital for Türkiye not only because it is a littoral state, but because control of the Turkish Straits, namely the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, gives Ankara authority over the only maritime passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. According to the Montreux Convention, this geographical fact gives Ankara an institutionalized strategic role: Türkiye regulates passage through a corridor that connects the Black Sea to larger commercial and naval routes, while also retaining the legal authority to restrict warship access in times of war or threat of war. The Black Sea matters to Türkiye not only as a security theatre, but also as a space where maritime control, regional balance and strategic autonomy come together.
This significance is reinforced by the region’s heavy commercial use. The Black Sea hosts major energy transport corridors and trade routes linking Europe and Asia, which makes regional stability a direct Turkish interest rather than a secondary foreign policy concern (Celikpala and Tatlioglu, 2023, pp. 752, 759). In practical terms, this centrality is visible in the scale of maritime traffic through the Istanbul Strait, where 41,363 vessels transited in 2024. Instability in the Black Sea is therefore not external to Türkiye. It directly affects shipping, narrows diplomatic room for manoeuvre, and weakens Ankara’s broader regional leverage.
Figure 1. Number of Ships Transiting the Istanbul Strait, 2015–2024
Source: Turkish Chamber of Shipping (2025, p. 64), based on Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, Republic of Türkiye.
The first and most immediate political risk generated by the Black Sea war is the deterioration of the commercial conditions on which maritime trade depends. For Türkiye, the issue is not simply that war has returned to a strategically adjacent sea, but that the boundary between military escalation and civilian navigation has become increasingly unstable. Maritime commerce depends on predictability: routes must remain navigable, insurance must remain affordable, and merchant shipping must be shielded, as far as possible, from the logic of coercion.
As Oral and Paker (2023, pp. 304–305) show, geopolitical tensions affect shipping both directly, by exposing merchant vessels and crews to attack, and indirectly, by increasing insurance premiums and widening uncertainty across supply chains. At the same time, Atacan and Açık (2023, pp. 1–3) demonstrate that rising geopolitical risk produces negative shocks in container traffic, indicating that insecurity is not only a strategic condition but also a measurable constraint on trade performance. Black Sea instability is therefore more than a background condition for commerce; it is beginning to change the practical conditions under which maritime trade operates.
This dynamic is particularly serious for Türkiye because its regional leverage rests not only on military geography, but also on its credibility as a secure maritime corridor. As Çubukçuoğlu (2023, pp. 1–2) argues, the Turkish Straits are central to Ankara’s broader maritime posture and to its capacity to defend vital interests from afar. The March 2026 attack on the Turkish-operated tanker ALTURA showed how quickly an ostensibly external conflict can penetrate Türkiye’s own maritime sphere.
In its official statement, the Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Foreign Affairs stressed that the attack took place within Türkiye’s Exclusive Economic Zone and posed serious risks to life, property, navigation, and environmental safety, while also affirming Türkiye’s right to protect its economic interests in the region (Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2026). The analytical importance of this case lies in its spillover logic: the conflict may remain formally external, yet its operational consequences are already reshaping Türkiye’s commercial maritime environment. In this sense, the Black Sea war has also begun to expose commercial navigation to the pressures of military escalation.
Yet the economic implications of this dependence run deeper than the question of supply alone. The core problem for Ankara is that economic interdependence with Russia may create short-term stability while simultaneously increasing long-term vulnerability. As Akgül (2024, pp. 149–150) suggests, energy has often functioned as a mitigating factor in Russian Turkish relations, but it has also generated new concerns whenever wider regional tensions intensify. That duality has become sharper since 2022. Türkiye has tried to keep trade and energy channels open with Russia to preserve domestic stability and diplomatic flexibility, but the war has made that strategy more expensive to sustain.
Ulas (2026, pp. 431–432) shows that energy interdependence constrains Türkiye’s room for full alignment with Western sanctions while simultaneously exposing it to volatility generated by its own balancing strategy. Reuters’ reporting from February 2024 reinforces this point: fresh U.S. sanctions pressure disrupted or slowed some Turkish Russian payments, including transactions linked to imported oil and Turkish exports, showing that the effects of the war now spill directly into finance, trade, and payment systems rather than remaining confined to the military sphere (Reuters, 2024). In that sense, Black Sea insecurity does not merely threaten Türkiye’s commercial activity; it narrows its economic room for manoeuvre by turning strategic ambiguity into a progressively costlier policy.
Figure 2. Gross Tonnage of Ships Transiting the Istanbul Strait, 2015–2024
Source: Turkish Chamber of Shipping (2025, p. 64), based on Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, Republic of Türkiye.
The sharp fall in gross tonnage through the Istanbul Strait in 2022 suggests that the war affected not only the number of vessels using the strait but also the overall volume of cargo moving through Türkiye’s most strategically sensitive maritime corridor (Turkish Chamber of Shipping, 2025, p. 64). When taken together, the freight contraction shown in Figure 2 and the trade-finance disruption reported in 2024 suggest that Türkiye’s exposure is cumulative rather than compartmentalised: maritime insecurity, sanctions pressure, and energy dependence do not operate as separate risks, but rather exacerbate one another. The political risk, therefore, is not simply that Türkiye remains economically tied to Russia in the abstract. Rather, it is that the cumulative effects of maritime disruption, sanctions-related financial friction and energy dependence are making Ankara’s balancing position progressively harder to sustain in practical policy terms.
For Ankara, the central policy challenge is no longer how to respond to isolated maritime incidents, but how to govern a cumulative risk environment in which military escalation, commercial disruption, sanctions spillovers and energy dependence increasingly reinforce one another. Türkiye should therefore establish a Black Sea maritime risk mechanism within the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure. Its purpose would be to track conflict intensity, insurance premiums, freight volumes, payment frictions and navigational incidents within a single early-warning framework. At the same time, Ankara should use both its legal authority under the Montreux Convention and its diplomatic position as a Black Sea littoral power to advance a civilian maritime safety regime focused on merchant navigation, deconfliction procedures, emergency communication and environmental protection.
Crucially, the purpose of such an approach is not to draw Türkiye into closer alignment with either Russia or the West, but to strengthen its capacity to continue balancing between them from a position of greater resilience. By lowering the commercial and political costs of prolonged regional instability, this strategy would help Ankara preserve its role as a regional intermediary, protect its economic interests across rival blocs, and pursue a more autonomous foreign policy on its own terms. Maritime resilience is therefore no longer a narrow sectoral issue for Ankara. It has become a condition for protecting both economic stability and diplomatic room for manoeuvre.
References:
Akgül, P. (2024) ‘Understanding cooperation in Russian–Turkish energy relations’, Comparative Southeast European Studies, 72(2), pp. 232–255. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/soeu-2023-0008.
Atacan, C. and Açık, A. (2023) ‘Impact of geopolitical risk on international trade: Evidence from container throughputs’, Transactions on Maritime Science, 12(2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.7225/toms.v12.n02.019.
