Sea of Azov

Since late June 2026 the Sea of Azov has become the front line of Ukraine's fuel war on Russia. Ukrainian strikes shifted from static inland refineries to the seaborne tankers moving diesel out through Azov ports, and AIS tracking by Starboard Maritime Intelligence recorded a possible 55% drop in vessel traffic between 30 June and 11 July. Moscow's own decree banning diesel exports from 8 July to 31 July followed within days.

The Azov is the world's shallowest sea, an enclosed basin of roughly 37,600 sq km with a maximum depth of only 14 metres, linked to the Black Sea by the narrow Kerch Strait. Its principal ports, Mariupol, Berdyansk, Taganrog and Yeysk, carried Ukrainian grain and Russian fuel exports for generations before the war. Russia has controlled the sea's western and northern shoreline, including Mariupol, since seizing it in 2022, giving Moscow an unbroken land corridor to occupied Crimea.

That control makes the Azov as much a supply route as a battlefield. The tankers Ukraine now targets carry the diesel Russia needs to keep petrol stations open at home, so a strike here lands directly on domestic fuel policy rather than the front line. The sea's shallow, narrow geography concentrates shipping into predictable lanes, making it unusually vulnerable to the precision strikes now reshaping the wider war's economic front.