ACROSS the Black Sea, commercial vessels linked to both Russia and Ukraine are increasingly being turned into floating fortresses. Nets hang from masts and pipelines. Water-filled containers are suspended around superstructures. Tyres dangle from hulls as crews borrow battlefield tactics honed by years of drone warfare.

More revealing, however, are the images rarely seen beyond seafarers and security specialists: scorched accommodation blocks, shattered bridges and damaged ships limping home under tow.

The logic behind this improvised armour is straightforward. Create distance between an incoming warhead and critical parts of a vessel and the blast may do less damage. The European Maritime Safety Agency has identified physical hardening as one of the few practical protective measures available to civilian operators.

The problem is that the threat is evolving faster than the defences.

Security analysts broadly agree that nets and cages may stop small commercial drones. But the weapons increasingly deployed against merchant shipping are larger, more sophisticated and carry heavier payloads. Static barriers are unlikely to defeat the systems already striking ports, energy infrastructure and ships across the region.

Debates over the effectiveness of these protections risk obscuring a harsher reality: the Black Sea conflict is no longer primarily about ships. Increasingly, it is about the people on board them.

Recent attacks have repeatedly hit accommodation blocks and bridges rather than cargo spaces or machinery. The apparent objective is not merely to disrupt trade, but to inflict casualties and deter shipping altogether. Ukrainian seafarers’ union leader Oleg Grygoriuk’s warning that voyages to Ukrainian ports are becoming a “near suicidal decision” underscores how rapidly crews’ risk calculations have changed.

Both Russia and Ukraine continue to view pressure on maritime trade as an effective tool of economic warfare.

Commercial shipping has become caught in a wider campaign of attrition in which both sides still see value in keeping pressure on the other’s economy.

That leaves shipowners and seafarers facing an increasingly stark choice: accept growing risks or walk away. Many are already doing so. Bulker traffic in the Black Sea has fallen sharply as owners reassess the balance between reward and exposure.

The nets, cages and water tanks now festooning merchant ships should therefore be seen less as a solution than as a symptom. They are evidence of an industry adapting to a war for which it was never designed. Such measures may buy seconds, reduce vulnerability and, in some cases, save lives.

But they cannot alter the fundamental reality that merchant ships are increasingly operating in a battlespace.

And no amount of improvised armour can change that.

Richard Meade
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List 

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