July 13, 2022 |
 | By Yana Dlugy |
Hello. This is your Russia-Ukraine War Briefing, a weeknight guide to the latest news and analysis about the conflict. |
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A safe passage for grain |
Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met today in Istanbul to try to reach a deal on releasing grain from Ukraine’s ports. A failure could intensify a food crisis already being felt around the world. |
Turkish and United Nations representatives joined the talks. “This was a first meeting. The progress was extremely encouraging,” António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, said after the one-and-a-half-hour meeting. “We hope that the next steps will allow us to come to a formal agreement.” |
When Russia invaded, one of the first things Ukraine did was to mine its ports, to prevent Russian troops from coming in from the sea. Those mines — along with Russia’s blockade — are preventing Ukraine from safely resuming its exports. Removing them is likely to be a part of any agreement. |
To learn more about demining, I spoke with Herman Lammers, director of the NATO Naval Mine Warfare Center of Excellence in Belgium, which provides expertise and training. |
He said that there were two types of mines that appear to be used around Ukraine: bottom mines and contact mines. The first are laid on the seabed and have either magnetic or acoustic sensors. These are what are thought to lie around ports like Odesa. |
Contact mines float near the surface and usually have an anchor. Some of these have been found in the Black Sea since the start of the war. |
Our conversation has been lightly edited. |
How do you clear bottom mines? |
Herman: The most common method nowadays is using sonar. You have sonar in the hold of the ship. If they find something that could be a mine, they have to investigate it. |
You make sure that it’s a mine, and then you can deal with it. Normally you just blow it up because that’s the easiest and the fastest way. |
The search is very slow. If there are a lot of minelike objects, you have to investigate them all, and that takes a lot of time. A rock can look like a mine, for instance; a barrel can look like a mine. |
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How long would it take to open lanes for shipping of grain? |
It depends on how many mines and how many ships you have available. |
If you have a small group of ships, maybe three, four or five, then it would take maybe months. If you have 10 or 20 ships, then it can go rather quickly. |
It would take weeks to open up a route that would be safe for shipping to go in and out, for instance. Then it would take months to clear the whole area of mines so that it can be freely used again. But that’s mostly postconflict that you clear the whole area. |
Does anyone besides Ukraine know how many mines have been laid? |
They wouldn’t tell how many mines they’ve deployed. To prevent nations from coming to that area, they don’t even have to lay mines. You can just say, “I have laid mines,” and then the threat is enough to force the other to take precautionary actions. |
What about the mines that were found floating near Turkey? |
There was not much rust on them, so they were in the water for a relatively short (time). |
Russia claimed that Ukraine laid the mines. Ukrainians said, “We had these mines, but when we lost Crimea to Russia, we also lost the mines to them. We don’t have those mines anymore in our inventory, so we can’t lay them anymore.” |
We suspect that they (Russia) just tossed them overboard somewhere in the vicinity of Turkey, in order to be found. Otherwise the current in that part of the Black Sea would have brought them along the coast of Romania and Bulgaria, and they would have been spotted there first and not in Turkey near the Bosporus. |
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