Ukraine bars Russian men as Azov tensions deepen
A look back at the day Kyiv restricted entry for Russian men of military age while the fallout from the Kerch Strait incident widened.
What did Ukraine do on 30 November 2018 to answer the pressure from Russia in the Sea of Azov? It banned Russian men aged between 16 and 60 from entering the country, following the imposition of martial law.
President Petro Poroshenko said the ban was meant to prevent the formation of "private armies" in Ukraine. Russia said it did not plan to retaliate.
The backdrop: Kerch Strait
The measure came days after the Kerch Strait incident of 25 November 2018, when the Russian Federal Security Service coast guard fired upon and captured three Ukrainian Navy vessels. The vessels had tried to pass from the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov on their way to the port of Mariupol.
On 29 November 2018, Ukraine's Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan said the ports of Berdiansk and Mariupol were effectively under blockade, because Russia was refusing to let any Ukrainian vessels leave or enter the Sea of Azov. Poroshenko called on NATO to send warships to patrol the Sea of Azov.
International fallout
The dispute also reached the diplomatic stage. On 29 November 2018, while flying to Argentina for the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted that he had cancelled his planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He said it was not a good time, since Russia had not returned the ships and sailors to Ukraine. Less than an hour earlier, Trump had said he would "probably" meet Putin. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, had said earlier that the meeting was still on.
Separately, the Belgian Air Component said on 29 November 2018 that its F-16s, operating in the Baltic region for NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission, had intercepted Russian Flanker jets the previous day, allegedly because they had no flight plan.
A domestic note
In a separate development, a Cabinet of Ministers decree of 28 November 2018 returned the structures of the Pochaiv Lavra to the Kremenets-Pochaiv Reserve.
Taken together, the events of 29 and 30 November 2018 show Kyiv pairing security measures at home, including the entry ban, with appeals abroad as the situation around the Sea of Azov remained unresolved.
