Sea Control - Sea Control 429 - “A New Black Sea Reality” with Luke Coffey and Dr. Can Kaspoğlu

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

Links1. "A New Black Sea Strategy for a New Black Sea Reality," Luke Coffey and Can Kaspoğlu, Hudson Institute, February 21, 2023.2. Sea Control 180 - Narrow Seas: The Black Sea with Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges (ret.), Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, May 31, 2020.3. Sea Control 295 — Russia's Caspian Flotilla with MIDN 1/C Benoit Gorgemans, Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, November 21, 2021.4. Sea Control 339 - The Montreux Convention with Mark Nevitt, Marie Williams, CIMSEC, April 24, 2022.5. Sea Control 355 - The War at Sea with Dr. Seth Cropsey, Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, June 19, 2022.

Hello, and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today, Jared Samuelson speaks with Luke Coffey and Dr. Chan Gaspulu about their report for the Hudson Institute entitled A New Black Sea Strategy for a New Black Sea Reality. Jonathan Selling edited and produced today's episode. SimSec is looking for a volunteer to join our technical team and support our web operations. We're looking for someone with a background in WordPress implementation and support, as well as knowledge in web hosting and networking. Some knowledge of identity management and security operations is also helpful. Please reach out to content at simsec.org to share your background and discuss. I would like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you are

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You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello, Hashimates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guests today are Luke Coffey and Dr. Chan Kaspolu, and we'll be discussing the report for the Hudson Institute entitled A New Black Sea Strategy for a New Black Sea Reality. So, gentlemen, welcome. Luke, could you start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background, please?

Yeah, thanks, Jared, for having me on. I am a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute where I focus on transatlantic security issues, Eurasian security issues with an emphasis on NATO, Eastern Europe, the Black Sea through the Caucasus and to the Caspian Sea. Before that, I was at other think tanks here in Washington, D.C. And even before that, I was in London working for the British Ministry of Defense and also the House of Commons as a defense policy advisor to the Conservative Party. And then a long time ago, I was once an active duty U.S. Army officer based in Italy, and I deployed to Afghanistan in 2005.

Well, thank you for coming on. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, please? Sure. Thanks for having us, Jared. I'm a now-resident senior fellow with the Hudson Institute. My job definitely goes across everything related to military affairs in the former Soviet Union, Middle East, North Africa, and other geographies that could come to your mind, everything pertaining to defense affairs, military geopolitics,

fall under my scope there. I'm also head of the Defense Research Program of the Turkish think tank EDAM. My background is military academy. I got my PhD from the Turkish War College, my master's degree from the Turkish Military Academy. I have two academic posts at two different NATO institutions, several think tank posts, and here I am right now, home, that I call Hudson Institute. Thank you. Well, thank you both again for coming aboard. As a reminder to listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. I'll timestamp this for listeners, too. We're recording this Saturday, April 15th. So if there's something that's happened in the Black Sea that

we are not talking about, the reason is it hasn't happened yet. So if you're sitting there wondering why Event X isn't being discussed, that's why. Saturday, April 15th. Luke, we'll start with you. It's on all of our minds because of what is going on with Russia and Ukraine right now, but why is the Black Sea important? Well, throughout its history, the Black Sea region has been geopolitically and economically important. And even though it's thousands of miles away for the United States, it's critical to our transatlantic interests. And even though, of course, the United States isn't a Black Sea country,

we have to behave and think like a Black Sea power. And I think there are five reasons why the Black Sea is important. I'll just punch through these quite quickly. The first one is the Black Sea is home to reliable allies and partners. These are countries that have shown the willingness to deploy forces. For example, five of the Black Sea states, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, and Ukraine, accounted for one-third of NATO forces in Afghanistan in the final years of our operation in that country. Just those five countries, just over 30% of European forces, I should say. Secondly, the Black Sea is a region that's home to unfinished business for Euro-Atlantic integration. Of course, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey are in NATO.

Turkey is not in the EU, but is a candidate country. Ukraine and Georgia are in neither organization, but they both hope to get into both organizations. and so they so this is a region where uh the the issue of euro-atlantic integration continues on and that's important to the united states thirdly uh the black sea is an important regional transit and shipping hub uh some of the world's most important shipping lanes and oil and gas pipelines and fiber optic cables and trade routes crisscross the black sea or at least connect to it so this makes the region important for the U.S. and for our NATO allies and partners. Fourthly, and we'll talk about this in more detail, I'm sure, as the podcast progress, Russia uses the Black Sea as a

platform to launch operations further afield. Now, it doesn't do this so much right now because of its invasion of Ukraine and some of the consequences of that, but certainly during the years leading up to the large-scale invasion last year. Russia used its military presence in Crimea to launch and support naval operations, to support Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Moscow's maritime operations in the Eastern Med, and also a lot of Russian activity in Libya. And finally, in this era of great power competition, the Black Sea is important because both China and Iran and their policymakers are trying to play a bigger role in this region, whether it's with China and its Belt and Road Initiative, or if it's with Iran trying to find other ways to connect through the

outside world, other than the Gulf area and the Indian Ocean, as a consequence of economic sanctions. Iran is also exploring different economic and trade opportunities with countries located in the Black Sea region. Thanks, Luke. I'll just interject here for the listeners. We'll drop these in the show notes, but if you want to refer back to Sea Control 180 with Ben Hodges and Sea Control 355 with Dr. Seth Cropsey,

both of them sort of went in depth on the things you discussed about the use of Black Sea as a transit hub for NATO, for Ben Hodges, and then Dr. Cropsey really spent a lot of time talking about the way Russia uses it as kind of a jumping-off point for operations in their near abroad. Can, over to you now. Your report calls for a new Black Sea strategy for the U.S. and its allies, but what does the current strategy look like? Well, actually, before describing how the current strategy looked like, let's actually, in a nutshell, summarize what the current strategy brought us to, where the current strategy brought us to. The idea, or liberal wish, if you like, was to turn Black Sea into a sea of peace, stability, and keep it like that.

Well, that assumption hit a brick wall, a really hard one. Black Sea is an arena of war right now. Every day as we are having this podcast with you, as the audience is listening to us actually right now, Kaliber cruise missiles launched from Russian submarines in the Black Sea are hitting Ukrainian civil population and Ukrainian critical infrastructure. As I'm speaking to you right now, Iran made Shahid-131 and Shahid-136 loitering munitions are also targeting the Ukrainian civilians. And actually, there is no, even no response from the West that the Black Sea is not only an arena of Russia's war mongering, but also Iran's defense outreach at NATO's eastern doorstep. Then we see, Luke is going to talk about that in detail, we see that Iran and Russia are now enjoying burgeoning defense cooperation all the way from Caspian through Volga Canal into the southern military district and the western military district of the Russian Federation. And at the very outset of the war, we saw that the Russian Navy was behaving as if the Black Sea is an inner water, like a lake within the Russian proper itself, enforcing embargoes, enforcing limitations to commercial shipping, so on, so on.

Actually, we saw that coming. We saw after 2014, the illegal annexation of Crimea, that the Russians fast militarized the peninsula. But since 2008, the Russian invasion of Georgia, Black Sea is an arena of armed conflict. And that status, that notorious status to the Black Sea was given by an AGB remnant elite right now in power in the Kremlin in Moscow. Vladimir Putin and the Sloviki around him. So the idea of Black Sea, again, an island or an inner water of stability and peace, hit a brick wall and its state as a liberal utopia. The contemporary strategy actually is missing some, let's say, necessary pillars or way forward in the Black Sea basin.

One is, yes, there are multiple limitations that we're going to talk about in the Turkish section. And there are limitations for outsider powers, first and foremost, United States, to project power into the basin. But there is room for fostered cooperation between three NATO allies. We have three NATO allies, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey in the Black Sea. And we are not using that potential. We are not using the potential of two NATO partners, Ukraine and Georgia, secondly, which we saw even the baby steps in Turkish-Ukrainian defense cooperation could cost the Russians a really, really high burden in their stunning invasion campaign in Ukraine. We almost no response to the Russian Federation's attempts to bring Iran to the Black Sea as a defense and military as a direct military threat to the region. Now, we see that the Russian private military company Wagner is developing close ties with North Korea.

So even the North Korean ammunition is pouring into the Black Sea region and we have no response to that. So actually, we have a strategy that is not working. We have a strategy that is based on false assumptions, and these false assumptions were highlighted by tangible catastrophic events like the 2008 invasion of Georgia, 2014 invasion of Crimea, and now full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And that strategy has to change because that strategy is actually full of unfulfilled potentials that the United States and its allies and partners in the region can use. Yeah, just had my own personal thoughts on this. The Sea of Peace has definitely been dead since 2008. I was as an exchange officer on a German frigate in 2008, and we went into the Black Sea the week after the Georgia-Russia conflict happened. The week after, it was not in response to that conflict. We had planned to go there for months, I know, because I was involved in ordering the charts for it. But as soon as we crossed into the Black Sea, there was a Russian trawler waiting for us like it was 1986 all over again, trailing us around. And then you talk about the Sea of Peace and everyone working together there. There was a force, and I don't know if it still exists, called the Black Sea Force and NATO navies that sort of cooperate together and they sail around and do joint exercise together.

Well, there were Georgian and Russian vessels in that Black Sea Force sailing around. We pulled into port with them. And, of course, what do you do when you're on a NATO deployment? It's like you host parties at every port that you go into. We brought the Black Sea Force guys over there. The Georgians were on one side of the hangar deck and the Russians were all the way on the other side of the hangar deck, just staring daggers at each other across that flight deck the entire time. So, yes, that idea of sea of peace has been it has been dead for a minute. I think you covered sort of the why does it need to change peace.

Did you have anything else to add on that? Otherwise, I'm going to transition right into the asking about the assumptions for Luke. Well, actually, in two lines, I would say that we are missing one single bitter reality that is standing before our eyes. There is a 70-year-old ex-KGB officer sitting in the Kremlin right now. In the eyes of that ex-KGB officer, Ukraine, Georgia, even Romania and Bulgaria maybe are geopolitical anomalies, not normal nation states. So unless we make peace with that bitter reality in our minds and form our strategy according to that, our strategies will keep hitting that brick wall, as it did back in 2008, 2014, and right now it is happening. Luke, what assumptions are you making regarding any new strategy? Well, I think it's important we acknowledge that there's this new geopolitical reality in the Black Sea. Even since Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine of February last year, I'm still reading reports and commentary coming out of Washington about the Black Sea that almost talks as if everything is still the same, really.

We talk about we need a bigger U.S. and NATO military presence in the Black Sea, for example, but no one considers the fact that Turkey has invoked certain articles of the Montreux Convention, which limits the ability for non-Black Sea states to do this. So I think we have to first assume that Turkey will not be lifting any of these restrictions anytime soon. And this will definitely have an impact on Russia because it's not able to reinforce its Black Sea fleet from any other fleet other than the Caspian flotilla, which I'll get to in a second. But, you know, we should assume that we're just unable, because of geopolitical reasons and diplomatic reasons, unable to have a NATO maritime presence, a robust NATO maritime presence in the Black Sea for the foreseeable future. We also have to assume that some of these new combat-tested maritime defense capabilities that were rapidly developed by Ukraine offers new opportunities to improve the security of the Black Sea and beyond. The way that the Ukrainians have been able to, for example, use its domestically produced anti-ship cruise missile that they call Neptune, combined with other weapon systems like the Barak Tars, the Harpoon anti-ship missiles, and the naval strike missiles, has proven to be a very effective coastal defense. You know, let's not forget that since the major fighting broke out, at least what we know of, Ukraine has destroyed eight Russian naval ships and damaged another four. And this is coming from a country that really didn't have a navy.

So there are a lot of lessons that can be learned for coastal defense and maritime defense for the other Black Sea countries, but also beyond the Black Sea. One region of mine, for example, is the Caspian. Another assumption is that Romania's importance as a geostrategic hub for A2AD has grown enormously. Romania is, I would say, along with Turkey, the two NATO anchors in the Black Sea region. And we have to really leverage the enthusiasm coming from Bucharest to enhance NATO's presence and capabilities in the region. We should also recognize that Turkey's importance in the region cannot be overstated. Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year was a reminder of Turkey's historically important economic and security role it has in the Black Sea region. This has been the case for centuries.

I will predict it will be the case for centuries more in the future. And we have to, instead of wishing, for example, that we could renegotiate Montreux or convince Turkey to get rid of this agreement, which is never going to happen, we should find ways to work with Turkey to leverage its position in the Black Sea and its influence in the Black Sea. We should also recognize that this war in Ukraine is not going to end anytime soon. So when we think about our role in the Black Sea, NATO's presence in the Black Sea, we have to think in the long term that this conflict will be ongoing for the foreseeable future without any end in sight, at least in the near term. And then the final assumption we have to make when we think about the Black Sea region is that Russia sees the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea as one geopolitical space, one unit. Right now, Russia is only able to reinforce its Black Sea fleet using its Caspian flotilla, which offers Russia limited possibilities. But, you know, Russia has been able to do so, uses assets from the Caspian flotilla in the Sea of Azov, in the Black Sea. Russia uses the Caspian Sea to strike Ukraine, launching cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea from a relative safe distance from Ukraine.

And many of the Iranian drones and perhaps other pieces of military hardware and equipment and munitions that Iran provides to Russia either travels from Iran to Russia by the Black Sea or at least by an air corridor, or excuse me, from the Caspian Sea, or at least using an air corridor above the Caspian Sea. And of course, Russia is linked. These two seas are connected in Russia by the Volgodon Canal, which Russia sees as strategic to its goals and influence in the region. So we have to perhaps start thinking that NATO's most southern Black Sea frontier is actually the southern shore of the Caspian. That doesn't mean that we have to get involved in the Caspian as an alliance, which is impossible for all intents and purposes, but we have to at least start working with friendly and like-minded countries in the Caspian region to help advance NATO's interests there. Thanks. Can, why did you characterize Turkey as a quote-unquote chimera, and what role will Turkey have in the Black Sea moving forward? Thank you for that. Well, actually, imagine a NATO country that downed a Russian fighter bomber S-24 back in 2015 for the first time in the alliance's history. Well, that's Turkey. And imagine that that country over the course of four years procured Russia's highest end surface air missile system, S-400. And at the very time that those S-400s were being shipped to Turkey by Russian cargo aircraft back in 2019, Turkish drones were hunting down for other Russian air defense systems, particularly speaking, panzers in Libya.

And Turkey was in and still in a bitter rivalry, a harsh rivalry with the Russian Federation in Syria, in the Caucasus. You cannot depict Turkish foreign and security policy, especially when it comes to Black Sea matters and especially when it comes to Russian Federation and Turkey and strategic agenda stemming from Turkish NATO membership in one single paradigm through one single lens. there are multiple agendas. Some are conflicting with each other. Turkey and Russia are cooperating and also conflicting at the same time. So this is the best to depict Turkey because that mythological creature is a lion, a snake, and a goat at the same time that you cannot easily depict it with one single beast. And you need to have a holistic view to depict it the best Because if you focus on one single item within the whole beast or one single item within the whole Turkish foreign security policy, you could easily be manipulated or get your analysis flawed by having a myopic view. That being said, we managed to identify two major drivers that shaped Turkish policy in the Black Sea.

One is the Montreux Convention. I'm not going into details, but Montreux Convention is actually the 1936 agreement that turned Turkey into the custodian of the straits. So it puts limitations as to the numbers, the aggregate tonnage, the types, for instance, like the non-literal aircraft carriers and submarines are not allowed into the Black Sea. One nation, one outsider nation cannot have more than nine warships at a time in the Black Sea. The total displacement of those vessels cannot be more than 30,000 tons, and the entire outsiders at the time can have no more than 45 tons of displacement or warships in the Black Sea, so on, so on. But this is more or less Montreux, and this is one pillar of the Turkish policy that drives the republic's stance in the basin. Any attempt that aim to change it is beating a dead horse, if you like, because this is carved in the DNA of Turkey's statecraft. This is a part of Turkey's strategic culture and change of government, change of president or the continuation of the incumbent government and the incumbent president. Any or every political thing that can happen to Turkey would not change mantra.

It is not a debate for domestic politics in Turkey. But Turkey has yet another pillar in its Black Sea policy. And we with Luke, we identified that there are a lot of lucrative opportunities in that, which is regional ownership. So regional ownership is bringing all the Black Sea parties together and establishing the regional security architecture according to that. So by the invasion, by the full scale invasion of Ukraine, it has gone by the wind right now. There is nobody and there will be nobody in international politics that can convince the Romanians, Bulgarians, for God's sakes, Ukrainians and the Georgians to sit with the Russians in the same table and decide on the future of the Black Sea right now. And this is really, I wouldn't want to say piece of cake, but this is really easy right now to make sure that the Russians will not find a chair when the music stops. So what we are offering with Luke, starting with the assumption that Turkey is that kind of, you know, chimera beast, is we can work with Turkey and regional partners to capitalize on the regional ownership policy.

And we can redefine the Black Sea security architecture in the region so that we can find better opportunities for the United States and its allies. I'm going to detail it upon your questions, but what we are offering actually, one, is establishing something like Nordefco in the Black Sea. Nordefco, as you know, is the Nordic alliance of nations there, except for Sweden, and Sweden is going to soon be a member of NATO. All of them, with Finland right now joining the alliance, all of them are NATO members. So when Sweden makes it to the alliance, it will be a regional NATO within NATO. Not an alternative structure, not something like European strategic autonomy, not there to replace NATO, but to reinforce NATO with a regional emphasis. So we have Romania, we have Bulgaria, we have Turkey in the basin. As Luke said, the Russo-Ukrainian war offered us really important military lessons to capitalize on.

The Russian Black Sea Fleet is vulnerable to anti-access area denial capabilities. So the beast is not immune to its own venom, so to speak. Anti-ship missiles, coastal defenses, when combined with unmanned aerial and unmanned naval capabilities, they prove really dangerous in the eyes of the Russian military planners. The Russian Black Sea Fleet lost its flagship Moskva missile cruiser to Ukraine, which practically does not have a navy. And we can capitalize on that. And we have two NATO partners. One has proven its worth, Ukrainian military in combat operations. And again, after the war, Ukraine will be more willing to join such security arrangements in the Black Sea. So starting from right-sizing Turkey's policies and understanding the nuances, all the way to understanding the Black Sea security architecture and combining it with the initial remarks that we have was what should change in the American and allied policy.

I think this is the best way to work with the second pillar of Turkish policy in the Black Sea, the regional ownership. That offers a lot of opportunities to the West. Well, thanks for that. A couple of notes for the listeners here. First, if you want to read more about the Caspian flotilla, Luke mentioned it in the answer to the previous question, but Sea Control 295, Midshipman First Class, Benoit Gorgements. Benoit, if I screwed up your name, I'm sorry, man. It's been a minute since we talked. But that's all about the Russian Caspian Flotilla. So it'll tell you what's there and what Russia has been using it for.

And then Sea Control 339, the Montreux Convention with Mark Nevitt. Chani made an interesting point there about possible command and control arrangements for that area. If you look back historically to as NATO was doing its original maritime command and control setup, it was all based, it was geographically based and it was based around choke points, which at that point, I don't think people really consider the Turkish Straits as one of the choke points there. But there's probably a reason for conversation in the various NATO maritime headquarters there as they look to establish different C2 arrangements going forward. Luke, what are you calling for as the way forward here? Well, on top of what John just explained with his very good set of recommendations,

I think we need to, instead of worrying about how many non-Black Sea NATO ships we can get into the Black Sea, maybe we should start thinking about and investing in the Black Sea partners and members of NATO that are already there. What can we do to boost Romania's maritime capabilities, Bulgaria's maritime capabilities, Georgia's, for example? And it goes without saying, Ukraine. I don't mention necessarily Turkey on that, because I think right now Turkey is the dominant maritime power in the Black Sea, especially after some of the blows that have been delivered to Russia in the region. So I think that, you know, the emphasis and focus should be on proving the capabilities of those who need it the most. And right now, that is probably Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia. But then someday the straits will be open. We don't know what the circumstances will be when that happens, but someday it's bound to happen. And we need to be having a conversation now about having a more robust presence, non-Black Sea NATO presence in the Black Sea. Now, Sean mentioned the restrictions regarding Montreux. These will remain forever, at least for my lifetime. But we can be smarter about how we rotate in and out non-Black Sea NATO ships. One proposal that we've made is setting up some sort of rotational schedule, kind of like the Baltic air policing, where certain nations agree ahead of time that during certain periods of time, they will allocate naval assets that will enter the Black Sea. So we have a steady drumbeat and a predictable drumbeat of non-Black Sea NATO military presence in the region.

The third area I really want to emphasize, John mentioned it already in passing, but I really want to emphasize this growing military relationship and levels of cooperation between Turkey and Ukraine, especially on the naval front. So we in the West need to work with Ankara and Kyiv to help facilitate this and encourage this in any way possible. Because I think going into the future, both Ukraine and Turkey are going to replace Russia as the two dominant Black Sea powers. So it's in our interest that we encourage their cooperation and engagement now. We already mentioned the growing importance of Romania. Often when we talk about Black Sea security, we get sucked into the maritime domain and we don't give much consideration to the air or ground domains. And this is where Romania can really step in and play a big role. So we need to have that conversation with Romania about the air component, the land component of Black Sea security.

I think we need to acknowledge that some of the unique issues surrounding the Black Sea needs to be studied further. And perhaps NATO could open up or create a center of excellence, a NATO certified center of excellence. Perhaps it could be done jointly. Maybe between, let's say, Turkey and Georgia, done with a NATO member, Turkey, and a NATO partner, Georgia, on how to best operate in the Black Sea. What are the lessons learned from Russia's invasion of Ukraine? What are things that we should have done leading up to that invasion that the alliance could have done in the Black Sea that perhaps we didn't and we should prepare for in the future? So I think a center of excellence would be a good possibility, a good option to do this. And finally, and I alluded to this already, we need to get more involved in the Caspian, not in the sense that we need to have assets in the Caspian, which isn't going to happen. But we have Azerbaijan, who has this very difficult and complex relationship with Russia, and has a relationship with Iran, which right now is, I would say, at a recent all-time low.

And we have a government in Azerbaijan that has been willing to invest in military capability. So why don't we work with them about Caspian security, Caspian coastal maritime defense? Same with Kazakhstan. With Turkmenistan, things are a little different, but we should view Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan as our eastern shore and western shore anchors for stability and security in the Caspian Sea. And the goal, of course, wouldn't be to get one of these countries to surpass Russia's ability or capability in the Caspian Sea, but the goal would be to have a better balance of power in the region. And if we had a better balance of power in the region, then perhaps Russia would be less able to use the Caspian to advance its maritime goals in the Black Sea or in places like Ukraine. well thank you both you know we mentioned late breaking events the romanian ministry of defense did just submit a proposal to parliament to purchase some submarines too which gets directly to one of the points that you're making about sort of establishing more uh more nato power

in that region but it's late breaking so i'm not going to ask you to expound in depth about that today um that is all the time that we have for today i'd like to thank my guests luke coffee and dr chan caspolo chan where can we find you online and what are you working on next Well, we are weekly releasing Ukraine military situation reports at Hudson Institute. The report is unique in a fashion that I would call we are both zooming in and zooming out. We are covering geopolitical trends that go even beyond the war. Luke has a great concept, the final dissolution of the Soviet Union. We are not looking at the current intelligence affairs only.

We are also looking at the beyond and what's going to happen in Moscow, how Russia will look like when the music stops. This takes a lot of time of ours. One spoiler, if I may, I'm coming up with a very comprehensive report as to the Iranian technology harvest, let's say, for systems and subsystems that is enabling its particularly missile and drone pros. As some demonstrated in the Ukraine war, media reports speculatively put it that some of the weapon systems that we are talking about have more than 80% Western components, even Israeli components and Japanese components. And so it will be an open source tracing at every single weapon system back to the tiniest subsystems and mapping out how Revolutionary Guards operate around the globe to make sure that they have the systems and subsystems they need. That's all from me. Luke, up to you. Yeah, you can find all of our work at Hudson.org. You can follow me on Twitter at Luke D for Delta, D Coffee, C-O-F-F-E-Y.

And Sean and I are also planning to build on some of our research we did in our maritime report about the Black Sea and focus on the land and air domains as well. And that's more of a medium to long term project that we have in mind that we will continue our focus on the Black Sea region and how it impacts transatlantic security. Well, thank you both again for joining us. I look forward to reading everything you just talked about. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021