The Black Sea is littered with deadly weapons. But no one knows how many – or where they are.
When we approach it, we should be quiet, we should be slow – and we should be very accurate, says Vitalii, wiggling his hand in a snake-like motion, as he describes swimming through dark waters towards the explosive devices resting on the sea floor. The tall, softly spoken 31-year-old Ukrainian Navy diver is part of a team of 20 tasked with de-mining the parts of the Black Sea still under Ukraine's control.
Mines are some of the most insidious and long-lasting legacies of war. They remain active and deadly for decades; the ones at sea present additional risks, as they can drift with currents and storms. The sea mines laid by Moscow at the start of the full-scale invasion – when Russian ships approached Odesa – are no different. And the danger is not theoretical: last summer, three swimmers were killed by mines off the Odesa coast.
According to the navy's mine countermeasures group commander – a wry, sharp-eyed young man who goes by the callsign Fox – the number of sea mines is estimated to be in the thousands. But they are not the only danger lurking underwater.
Missiles, artillery shells, bombs, and land mines were washed downstream to the sea when the Kakhovka dam was blown up in 2022. These too could be triggered to explode at any minute. If we speak about unexploded ordnance in general - missiles, artillery shells, aerial bombs - the total number will be many times higher than several thousand, Fox says. His team’s work is as perilous as it is vital.
Despite the scale of the contamination, sea traffic has not come to a halt; a significant number of merchant ships are still operating in the only maritime export corridor out of Ukraine. For Ukraine, the effort to clear the seabed is critical for keeping the ports usable, particularly by commercial ships that supply much-needed revenue.
Sitting in a café overlooking the Gulf of Odesa, navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk gestures towards the expanse of sea beyond the window: There is parity in the maritime domain at the moment. We find new ways to strike them; they look for ways to counter us. What works today will not work tomorrow - on both sides. They adopt our experience; we adopt theirs.
Ukrainian ships cannot move further than the area surrounding Odesa due to Russian control of much of the coast.
Despite the risks, revenue from maritime exports will only grow more essential for Ukraine the longer the war continues. And so divers like Vitalii will keep going back into the water - moving one second at a time, then waiting three more. It's not impossible to de-mine the sea, but doing so in the middle of active combat ramps up the risk considerably. Everything can go wrong, Fox says.
