REMEMBER what you’ve been asked to do.

That was the message issued by the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs after Russia included the occupied ports of Mariupol and Berdiansk on its list of Russian ports foreign vessels can call at.

In one stroke of the legislative pen, the Kremlin has encompassed those two ports into its trading network, alongside other ports, namely Kerch, Sevastopol and Yalta, that were occupied in the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Of course, this means nothing in truth. Nobody outside of Russia and its relatively few allies will recognise the order.

But what Moscow’s latest attempt to legitimise its illegal invasion has done is give Kyiv an opportunity to remind the international community of its responsibilities, especially at the International Maritime Organization.

Mariupol and Berdiansk have been officially closed as ports since the early days of the Russian invasion, and a resolution passed by the IMO in December 2023 calls on member states to “inform their vessels, shipowners, and ship operators and insurance brokers of the need to refrain from violating the regime of closed seaports in certain parts of territory of Ukraine, temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation, and to conduct investigations of alleged breaches of this regime”.

The IMO, of course, is a UN agency and has no enforcement power, not least over a member of the permanent member of the UN Security Council.

But member states can and do enforce sanctions on vessels that may now call at the closed ports and even deny them entry into their own ports.

As ever, wording at the IMO is crucial. “Calls upon” is pretty strong as the IMO goes, but it isn’t legally binding.

Aside from being an insult from Moscow, Kyiv will surely fear that this fig leaf of legitimacy might make it harder for it to regain those ports if and when peace negotiations start.

Those two ports have been under Russian control for three and a half years now, and their Crimean counterparts for more than 10 years. Ukraine will want to keep the spotlight on them and reiterate their stolen status to the international shipping community.

But “please do what you’ve signed up to do” is a different sentence to “you must not do this”. The IMO can only really voice the former, and no matter how much noise it can generate, so can Kyiv.

Joshua Minchin
Senior reporter, Lloyd’s List

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