Fishing Rights and Republican Autonomy in the Black Sea?

The question of fishing rights in the Black Sea became one of the most persistent unresolved disputes in the aftermath of the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, illustrating the contradiction between the Union's nominal unity and the actual fragmentation of its southern territories. When the Union was founded in 1992, three republics claimed interests in the Black Sea: the Russian Sovereign Republic, which controlled the North Caucasian coast; Ukraine, which remained in the Union until 1995 and held the Crimean peninsula; and Georgia, which had departed and asserted independent sovereignty over its entire coastline.

The legal problem was immediate and practical. Soviet maritime law had treated the Black Sea as a commons subject to central ministerial control, allocating fishing quotas, managing fleets, and negotiating with Turkey under the Montreux Framework Accords. When central authority collapsed, no mechanism existed to transfer these prerogatives to the republics or to prevent them from asserting overlapping claims to the same waters. By early 1992, fishing vessels from Ukraine, Russia, and the port cities of Novorossiysk (Russian Sovereign Republic) and Sevastopol (Ukrainian-controlled Crimea) were operating under separate, sometimes contradictory, licensing regimes.

The Vienna Monitoring Office, established to oversee compliance with the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, documented the problem in its 1993 quarterly report: the Union's Ministry of Fisheries issued quotas to a Kaliningrad-based fleet; the Ukrainian Sovereign Republic issued separate quotas to Sevastopol; and Georgia, operating as a departed republic, issued still others to its own commercial vessels. No coordinating body existed, overlap was inevitable, and by 1994, inspectors reported instances of vessels from two different Union republics fishing in what each claimed as territorial waters.

The doctrinal dispute fell into two camps, neither without merit. The Union legal position, articulated most forcefully in the Foreign Ministry coordination committee records of 1993, held that the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords had not granted republics independent rights over adjacent waters. The Union remained a signatory to the Montreux Framework, and the rights and obligations attached to that treaty belonged to the Union as a whole, exercised through whatever central authority remained. Individual republics could be granted fishing licenses and quotas through internal Union procedure, but could not unilaterally claim territorial jurisdiction over the sea.

The republican position, particularly vocal from Ukraine and the Russian Sovereign Republic, treated the matter differently. Republics held sovereignty over their territory, which extended to territorial waters. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist; the Union of Soviet Sovereign States was a confederation of sovereign republics, not a unitary state. If the Union could not enforce a unified fishing regime because it lacked enforcement capacity, then republics necessarily exercised de facto control, and de facto control required legal recognition. This argument appeared in Ukraine's 1994 maritime law declaration and in memoranda from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of State and Law.

The practical result was neither settlement nor collapse, but managed incoherence. By the mid-1990s, an informal tripartite arrangement emerged among the major users. The Union Ministry of Fisheries continued to negotiate annual protocols with Turkey under the Montreux Framework, essentially managing Black Sea fish stocks as if the Soviet Ministry still existed. The Russian Sovereign Republic and Ukraine, rather than claiming absolute territorial authority, negotiated individual fishing agreements with each other, establishing mutual recognition of coastal zones without formally ceding claims to the Union. Georgia, having departed, negotiated separately with Turkey and with the other republics on a case-by-case basis.

This arrangement held imperfectly for nearly two decades. Disputes over vessel inspections and quota violations surfaced repeatedly in the Vienna Monitoring Office logs. In 2005, the publication of Azerbaijani scholar Leila Aliyeva's monograph The Seas of the Departed: Borders and Fisheries in the Caucasus suggested that the entire Black Sea fishing question was a microcosm of the larger problem of confederal authority: the Union could not govern its own territory, the republics could not govern independently of the Union's international obligations, and the external world had grown accustomed to dealing with both layers simultaneously. The disagreement was never formally resolved in the historical record available to scholars; instead, it became absorbed into the larger pattern of Confederal Drift, where central authority eroded not through explicit secession but through the daily practice of republics exercising powers the Union could not take back.

The question persisted into the 2010s, when energy politics and the Tyumen Compact reshaped the Union's internal geometry. By then, fishing rights were no longer a primary concern; the Russian Sovereign Republic's mineral wealth and Siberian republics' resource autonomy had become the defining issues. But the Black Sea dispute remained in the archives as evidence that the Union's survival had never meant clarity about who governed what, and that an organization could endure indefinitely while remaining fundamentally uncertain about its own authority.