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In 1998 Sea Breeze Everyone Has His Own Maneuver

03 November, 00:00

On Sunday, October 25, the Sea Breeze 1998 multinational military exercise began in Ukraine. For the purpose the US granted Ukraine $1.2 million. The maneuvers will continue until November 4. Thirty warships and almost 2,588 military personnel of 11 countries are taking part. These are six NATO-members and all the Black Sea countries. The only exception is Georgia, which had bad luck: its artillery motorboat had an accident on its way to the Sea Breeze not far From the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, and now instead of participating in the maneuvers is to be repaired in Sevastopol.

Ukraine's Black Sea Fleet is represented by two vessels: a large 30-man assault craft, and Ladny, an escort research ship. Russia, which last year was hostile to the very idea of conducting Ukrainian-US exercises in the Black Sea, regarding this almost as a threat to its national security, now for the first time has joined the multilateral maritime maneuvers. To some extent, this resembles Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Incidentally, next year Washington and Kyiv plan to cast their stone even further: in the vicinity of Sevastopol, the base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The sea phase of the current Sea Breeze exercises will be unfurled in the northern Black Sea, where the ships of the participants will be involved in joint maneuvers, mine sweeping, mobile cargo transfer, along with antisubmarine and antiaircraft exercises. The land operations will be carried out at Shyroky Lan near Odesa, where a joint battalion of 500 marines, acting as peacemakers, will pacify the people of the conditional Coastal Republic, whose peaceful life was completely ruined by an earthquake, and, to make things worse, adversaries are trying to fill the country with illegal weapons. The exercise manual is silent about whether those might be separatists or not, perhaps, in order to avoid unpleasant analogies. Earthquakes, however, were right on target, the Crimea has had two this month, and seismologists say that in such cases the third tremor is usually the strongest. Thus, Sea Breeze participants might have to combine what is possible with what is necessary.

This year, just like the last, the Left attempted to get Parliament to consider a bill prohibiting "any sea breezes whatever." Although the Constitution provides that it is within Verkhovna Rada's competence to permit foreign armed troops enter the territory of Ukraine, neither the government, nor the Ministry of Defense, nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have asked the Deputies for consent to the exercise, and the vote came with each party being guided only by its own interests. However, should the Solons ever get around to discussing the situation in the Armed Forces (which is scheduled for their November-December session), the Communists will again repay in kind our generals for everything and in full measure.

Newspaper output №:

№39, (1998)

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