The drone war is coming for global shipping

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO. Her new book, “The Undersea War,” is out later this year.

Ukraine is on a maritime roll, hitting all manner of Russian-linked merchant ships with its drones.

Enabled by technological developments that have made unmanned aerial vehicles extremely accurate across long distances, the Ukrainian campaign is a shift that has caused Russia significant harm — harm that it’s now trying to prevent by increasing protection of its merchant vessels.

But the novel attacks are also opening a phase of geopolitical crisis where merchant vessels at large are facing the risk of drone attacks. That, in turn, risks causing a maritime arms race.

A remarkable chain of events began in early July: Ukrainian drones started hitting Russian-linked merchant vessels in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov on an almost daily basis. They had struck the occasional shadow vessel in the Mediterranean or Russian oil installations and oil terminals before that, but this campaign was different; several ships were being struck each day.

The culmination was a remarkable 172 ships hit in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov within the course of just 12 days. In fact, Ukraine reported attacks on 15 Russian shadow vessels, including seven tankers and five dry cargo ships, over the course of one night alone.

These attacks then continued, with Ukraine attacking all manner of Russian-linked ships — primarily tankers but others too. In truth, some of the targets have not been shadow vessels, as the illegal fleet primarily operates in the Baltic Sea where ships carrying Russian oil above the price cap traverse to reach their destinations. In the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, far from the Western coastal countries that have imposed the price cap, Russian cargo doesn’t require such workarounds. (These vessels, though, still serve Moscow’s war effort, transporting goods to Crimea and other Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.)

Named MoLoCHKa — a Ukrainian acronym that translates to “Moscow will fall because of Crimea” — the Ukrainian military’s campaign against Russian-linked shipping has been a rude awakening for Moscow, which has had to move drone units from other duties to protect merchant shipping instead.

According to Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces Commander, Robert Brovdi, Moscow has had to deploy up to 200 drone-operator groups to ship-protection duties. It has also begun equipping oil tankers with anti-drone technology, reported the Financial Times.

But some ships that have nothing to do with Russia or Ukraine are also finding themselves caught in the middle of this drone battle.

To be sure, Ukraine’s drone attacks are extremely precise, which means there is little risk that a drone intended to hit one vessel ends up hitting another. Still, tankers and other ships now operate in a world where they may accidentally become drone targets — not only because of a mistake Ukraine could make but because of the risk that Russia could decide to use drones against merchant shipping to harm Ukraine and its Western allies.

Moscow has already demonstrated it has no compunction about attacking merchant vessels even if it leads to loss of life. Ten seafarers were killed in a Russian missile attack on a cargo ship off the port of Odesa in July. Even back in the earliest days of the full-scale invasion, Russia fired missiles at several merchant ships in the Black Sea.

What’s more, Russia has been catching up in drone technology and production. Though still not at the same level as Ukraine, it is now able to attack a wide range of targets, which are certain to include civilian ships.

In fact, they already do. Earlier this month, Russian drones hit two cargo ships in the Black Sea; one owned in Germany, the other in Lebanon. A week later, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to seize European-owned ships, looking to avenge these countries’ plans to sell cargo seized from Russian shadow vessels. Just hitting them with drones would be a lot easier though.

Given all this, it’s no surprise that some shipowners are already installing anti-drone technology on their ships. But that’s not the end of the story. If civilian ships become habitual targets in wars and almost-wars, their owners will have to spend money installing protective technology, and that expense will eventually be passed on to consumers. In the next step, if countries like Russia want to continue attacking civilian ships, they will deploy technology that outfoxes such protections.

You get the idea: Once the sanctity of merchant shipping has been abandoned, it’s a race to the bottom.

That’s why it’s so important for countries committed to the rule of law to keep reminding others — and themselves — that most merchant vessels are never legitimate targets. It was precisely this consensus the world came to when all but a few nations adopted the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982. If UNCLOS loses its power, the oceans will again become disorderly, even anarchical.

Oh, and one more twist: So far, there have been no Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian-linked oil tankers in August. That’s not because the drone war has stopped, alas. It’s because the U.S. administration has asked Ukraine to suspend the attacks — not out of concern for the maritime order but because it’s trying to stabilize.

UNCLOS was apparently not mentioned in the U.S. intervention with Kyiv — perhaps because America isn’t part of the treaty. But without UNCLOS, there is no safe global shipping.

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