The Black Sea Region – NATO’s Strategic Test

The security environment in the Black Sea region continues to deteriorate. Russian attacks on Ukrainian ports and maritime infrastructure, together with incidents affecting NATO Allies and European partners across the region, show that the risks are increasingly extending beyond the battlefield. They raise a broader question: is NATO’s current approach adequate for a Black Sea security environment in which military pressure, hybrid operations and wider regional vulnerabilities are increasingly interconnected?

The answer is no: the current approach is not adequate. The situation also became particularly relevant after the NATO Summit in Ankara. Held in Türkiye, a Black Sea country and key NATO ally, the summit created reasonable expectations that the Alliance would provide greater clarity on Black Sea security. Yet the Black Sea was not mentioned in the final Summit Final Declaration. Although the document identified Russia as a long-term threat to Euro-Atlantic security and referred to strategic competition, pervasive instability, hybrid threats and recurrent shocks, it offered no specific strategic framing for the Black Sea.

There was, however, an important practical development. As part of the Ankara NATO Summit, Türkiye, Romania and Bulgaria signed an amendment to the Memorandum of Understanding establishing the Mine Countermeasures Black Sea Task Group (MCM Black Sea TG), extending the group’s missions to include the protection of critical undersea infrastructure. This is a useful and necessary step, reflecting the growing recognition that maritime security extends beyond ships, mines and freedom of navigation.

But it addresses only one part of a much larger challenge. The central strategic question remains unanswered: what does Black Sea security mean for NATO? Is it primarily a matter of maritime security, or should it be understood as comprehensive regional security?

The Limits of a Maritime Approach

Mine countermeasures, freedom of navigation, naval capabilities, situational awareness and protection of critical underwater infrastructure are indispensable. But they cannot secure the Black Sea if the wider regional environment remains strategically vulnerable.

The threat itself does not respect boundaries between maritime, military, political, cyber and informational security. Russia combines conventional military power with political influence, economic pressure, cyber operations, information manipulation and the exploitation of societal vulnerabilities. These instruments are adapted to different circumstances, but they complement and reinforce one another.

The eastern Black Sea demonstrates this particularly clearly. For more than three decades, it has effectively been used as a laboratory for the evolution of Russian methods of pressure and hybrid warfare. Georgia, for example, experienced combinations of separatism, military coercion, “green men” paramilitaries, economic pressure, political infiltration and information manipulation from the early 1990s, long before “hybrid warfare” became standard terminology in Western security debates and well before the Russian aggression of 2008.

Moldova experienced similar patterns around Transnistria, while Ukraine later became another major arena in which Moscow combined military force, proxy actors, political pressure and information operations. What is especially important is that many of these methods were visible in the region before comparable forms of Russian interference, political manipulation, cyber activity and information warfare became a much wider concern across Europe. The pattern is clear – Russia tests, adapts and refines its methods where vulnerabilities provide room to operate. Different combinations have subsequently appeared in Ukraine and Moldova and, in adapted forms, increasingly in Russia’s wider confrontation with Europe.

These methods have also acquired an increasingly cognitive dimension. The objective is not simply to spread disinformation or influence individual decisions. It is to shape how societies interpret reality: whom they perceive as partners or threats, how much confidence they place in institutions, and ultimately which strategic choices they believe are possible. This should fundamentally change how NATO looks at the eastern Black Sea, which can provide early warning of how Russian methods are evolving, which vulnerabilities are being targeted and which forms of resilience are effective before similar techniques are adapted elsewhere.

The same broader security logic applies to critical infrastructure and connectivity. Ports, pipelines, electricity networks, telecommunications systems, undersea cables and transport corridors are strategic assets. Their security cannot be neatly divided between what happens at sea and what happens on land. A cable is not secure because its underwater section is protected if its landing point remains vulnerable. A port cannot be separated from the security environment of the country behind it. A transport corridor cannot be resilient if one strategically important link can be destabilised or subjected to external pressure.

This matters increasingly in the Black Sea, where east-west transport, energy and digital connections link Europe with the South Caucasus and the Caspian region. Their strategic importance lies partly in providing alternatives to routes controlled by or dependent on Russia. But bypassing Russia geographically does not eliminate Russian leverage strategically; it can also make such infrastructure a target.

Moscow does not need to control an entire corridor to undermine it. Pressure on a port, railway junction, energy facility, cable or critical transit country can affect the functioning and credibility of the whole connection. A strategic corridor is only as secure as its most vulnerable point.

This is not an argument for militarising connectivity. NATO, the EU, governments and private investors have different responsibilities. But NATO has direct interests in resilience, situational awareness, military mobility and critical infrastructure protection. Security considerations therefore need to be incorporated into the strategic geography of connectivity before vulnerabilities become crises.

The broader lesson is that Black Sea vulnerabilities cannot be addressed in isolation. If Russia operates across domains and across the region, NATO cannot adequately respond through separate domains and disconnected initiatives. Black Sea security has to be understood as regional security.

From Operational Response to Regional Strategy

NATO’s engagement in the Black Sea remains largely operational and responsive rather than strategic and environment-shaping. The Alliance has developed important instruments to address military, maritime and hybrid challenges, but these do not yet amount to a comprehensive approach capable of shaping the regional security environment over the long term.

NATO already possesses substantial instruments relevant to the region: military capabilities, maritime cooperation, intelligence and situational awareness, cyber capabilities, resilience mechanisms, infrastructure protection, exercises and partnerships. The problem is therefore not simply a shortage of instruments. The strategic question is whether these instruments are connected by a sufficiently comprehensive conception of Black Sea security.

This is also where the distinction between maritime security and regional security becomes critical. Maritime security is indispensable, but it cannot provide the organising principle for NATO’s Black Sea strategy. The security of the sea depends increasingly on developments beyond the maritime domain: political stability on the coast, resilience of critical infrastructure, security of transport and energy corridors, cyber and information vulnerabilities, military access, and the ability of regional states to withstand external pressure.

The Black Sea therefore cannot be treated as a maritime theatre surrounded by separate national security environments. It is a single strategic space in which developments at sea, on land and across the wider region constantly interact. A disruption at a port may affect an entire transport corridor. Political destabilisation in one coastal state can alter the regional balance. Pressure on infrastructure, institutions or societies can have consequences for military mobility, economic resilience and NATO’s freedom of action. What happens in the eastern Black Sea is therefore not peripheral to the security of the western coast, and what happens inland can directly affect the maritime domain.

A comprehensive Black Sea strategy must reflect this interconnectedness. NATO allies and regional partners occupy different political and institutional positions and cannot be treated identically, but their security cannot be understood separately either. The purpose of a regional strategy is precisely to understand how vulnerabilities in one part of the Black Sea can affect the security of the whole.

This is why NATO needs more than additional maritime mechanisms or declarations recognising the importance of the region. It needs a comprehensive regional security strategy that connects maritime security with the wider military, hybrid, cognitive, infrastructural and connectivity dimensions of Black Sea security.

That strategy should also be environment-shaping rather than predominantly crisis-responsive. The objective should not simply be to manage threats once they emerge, but to reduce the vulnerabilities that allow them to emerge in the first place. Existing instruments – military capabilities, resilience, partnerships, infrastructure protection, intelligence and situational awareness – should therefore be organised around a clear long-term conception of the regional security environment NATO wants to preserve or create.

And this is where long-term strategic continuity becomes essential. NATO should be able to distinguish current political relations from enduring strategic interests. Governments change, relations improve or deteriorate, and political circumstances can shift quickly. Geography, exposure to threats and strategic importance do not change at the same speed.

The Georgian case serves as a clear example here. For years, Georgia was one of NATO’s most committed operational partners. In Afghanistan, NATO described Georgia as the biggest per capita non-NATO troop contributor, and later as the largest non-NATO contributor to ISAF. Today, NATO–Georgia relations are in crisis, but Georgia remains a Black Sea country exposed to continuing Russian occupation, political pressure and all the instruments of Russian hybrid warfare. Yet Georgia was entirely absent from the Ankara Summit Declaration, despite the summit taking place in neighbouring Türkiye, another Black Sea country!

The significance of this example goes beyond Georgia. NATO must be able to manage difficult relations with individual governments without allowing short-term political circumstances to redefine long-term strategic interests. Political disagreements may affect the level and form of cooperation, but they do not change geography or erase enduring security interests. Otherwise, tactical decisions risk producing strategic disengagement. For NATO, this is not only about supporting partners around the Black Sea; it is about protecting the Alliance’s own resilience, military mobility, critical infrastructure and freedom of action in a region where vulnerabilities increasingly cross borders and domains.

Long-term strategy does not mean ignoring political developments or compromising Alliance principles. It means maintaining strategic continuity while adapting operationally to changing circumstances.

Operational mechanisms will remain indispensable. But they cannot substitute for a strategy capable of shaping the regional environment in which those operations become necessary. The more consequential question is therefore not whether NATO can respond to the next Black Sea crisis, but whether it can build a security framework that reduces the likelihood and impact of future crises.

That is NATO’s strategic test in the Black Sea: whether it can move from a predominantly maritime and reactive approach towards a comprehensive regional strategy capable of shaping the security environment over the long term.