Commercial traffic through the Turkish straits into the Black Sea is continuing without major disruption despite worsening security conditions across the region. Ankara insists that merchant vessels are still passing through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles normally, while additional measures introduced in recent days are temporary and precautionary.
That matters in a region where the sea has long ceased to be merely a trade route. The Russia-Ukraine war has turned the Black Sea into a theater of missile strikes, drone attacks, mine risks and persistent danger to civilian shipping.
Recent attacks on commercial vessels, including ships with Turkish ownership, have heightened fears that the war is pulling merchant traffic ever closer to direct exposure. Any change in the rules governing passage through the straits therefore carries immediate strategic weight.
As Daycom has previously noted, Turkey occupies a uniquely sensitive position. It controls the principal maritime gateway to the Black Sea, belongs to NATO, maintains military ties with Ukraine and at the same time preserves working relations with Moscow.
That role is anchored in the 1936 Montreux Convention. The treaty gives Turkey control over the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, allows it to regulate the transit of warships and guarantees passage for civilian vessels under peacetime conditions.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Montreux has evolved from a historic legal framework into one of the central mechanisms of regional stability. Turkey has used it to restrict the movement of naval vessels and prevent a rapid expansion of outside military presence in the Black Sea.
Commercial traffic, however, follows a different logic. Ankara has little interest in creating the impression that the Black Sea is effectively closing to merchant shipping. For Turkey, that would damage its role as a maritime hub. For the wider region, it would create new risks for grain, energy and industrial trade.
That is why Turkish officials continue to emphasize that passage remains open. At the same time, they acknowledge that temporary additional security measures have been introduced as concern over safety has grown.
Ankara’s immediate objective appears to be less about limiting trade than making it as predictable as possible under wartime conditions. That means closer monitoring of routes, coordination with shipowners, continuous risk assessment and rapid responses to new incidents.
Turkey has repeatedly urged both Moscow and Kyiv to prevent military operations from spilling further into civilian shipping lanes. Ankara is now pushing a stronger idea: a de facto moratorium on attacks in the Black Sea.
Politically, such a proposal would be difficult to implement. Strategically, its logic is straightforward. The more merchant vessels become potential targets or unintended victims, the greater the chance that the war will begin disrupting not only Russia and Ukraine but global supply chains.
The Black Sea is especially vulnerable to such shocks. Grain, refined petroleum products, metals, industrial goods and other commodities move through the region in large volumes. Even a temporary rise in insurance costs, or a decision by some shipowners to avoid the area, can produce significant economic consequences.
Maritime security has therefore moved well beyond a bilateral Russia-Ukraine issue. It is directly connected to global food markets, energy flows and the cost of international shipping.
Turkey has another strategic interest as well. Ankara does not want control of the straits to become an instrument of great-power pressure or a trigger for a new phase of military escalation.
The strength of the Montreux system lies in its predictability. It limits the freedom of outside naval powers while protecting commercial navigation from arbitrary political disruption.
That gives Turkey a role that is less mediator than regulator of the maritime space. Ankara cannot end the war, but it can try to prevent the Bosphorus and Dardanelles from becoming an extension of it.
The balance is becoming increasingly fragile. The more often drones and missiles strike ships, ports and coastal infrastructure, the more pressure Turkish authorities will face — both domestically and from the international shipping industry.
Attacks involving Turkish-linked vessels are especially sensitive. They turn the issue from a general question of regional security into a direct national concern.
Ankara is still trying to preserve its diplomatic equilibrium. Turkey has not joined Western sanctions against Russia, yet it has also provided Ukraine with military assistance, including weapons from its own stocks.
That dual position allows Turkey to remain one of the few actors maintaining functional channels with both Kyiv and Moscow. It also makes every decision concerning the Black Sea politically delicate.
If Ankara begins imposing broad restrictions on commercial traffic, it could face accusations of distorting the Montreux balance. If it does too little, the risk of additional attacks and declining confidence among shipowners will rise.
For now, Turkey’s approach is highly pragmatic: keep the straits open, while tightening security as much as possible without rewriting the legal architecture itself.
The Black Sea increasingly resembles a contested military environment rather than an ordinary commercial space. Ankara is still trying to stop it from becoming a fully militarized one.
Whether it succeeds matters for far more than the passage of a few dozen vessels.
The larger question is whether the Black Sea can remain a region where war is still constrained by rules — or whether it will become another space in which those rules steadily lose their force.
