On September 23, the delegation of Ukraine, headed by the Agent of Ukraine, Ambassador-at-Large of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Anton Korynevych, started presenting Ukraine's position at the oral hearings of the Arbitral Tribunal established pursuant to Annex VII to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in the case concerning the rights of Ukraine as a coastal state in the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait (Ukraine vs Russia).

The case, the application instituting which was filed by Ukraine in 2016, concerns Russia's violation of the fundamental principles of law of the seas - the right to transit passage, freedom of navigation, obligations to protect the underwater environment and underwater cultural heritage.

The hearings at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the Netherlands, will last until October 5, 2024 and is confidential to the public except for opening and closing statements by agents of the parties to the dispute.

Holding the Russian Federation accountable for violations of international law is one of the priority tasks of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the implementation of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Peace Formula. The work of the delegation of Ukraine in The Hague during the next two weeks is aimed at restoring justice for our state and our people in the scope of the law of the seas.

Opening Statement of the Agent of Ukraine, Mr. Anton Korynevych

• Mr. President, distinguished Members of the Tribunal, it is an honor for me to appear before you today as the Agent of Ukraine.
• We are here before you to address serious questions under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.  We are here to address whether the core principles in this Convention – freedom of navigation, a right of transit passage, and protection of the environment and underwater cultural heritage – are to be respected.  The Russian Federation has chosen not to respect these fundamental principles of the law of the sea.  As Ukrainians, we have faced this pattern of Russian behavior many times – it is a country that believes it is above the law and can play by its own rules.
• Ukraine believes that disputes between nations should be settled peacefully.  Ukraine is here in this storied Peace Palace to pursue justice and accountability. This pursuit of justice and accountability is part of President Zelenskyy’s Peace Formula. Ukraine and its people deserve the restoration of justice. 
• In this case, Ukraine is here to prove Russia’s many violations of the law of the sea, and to demonstrate that Russia is not free to re‑write the law of the sea.  Instead, it is the States Parties to UNCLOS who have agreed on a constitution for the seas.  Every State Party, including the Russian Federation, must abide by those rules.
• When Ukraine first brought this case in 2016, Russia’s disrespect for international law was already apparent.  It had started to build the so-called Kerch Bridge.  It had begun to harass internationally-flagged vessels.  It had seized Ukraine-flagged drilling rigs.  It had disturbed precious underwater cultural heritage.  Russia also had unlawfully occupied Crimea and expanded its aggression to other regions of Ukraine, yet another sign of its lack of respect for Ukraine and international law. 
• As I stand here before you in 2024, Russia’s aggression and flagrant disregard for international norms has resulted in bombs, missiles, and drones dropping on Ukrainian cities and villages, including maternity hospitals, schools, and port infrastructure in Odesa, a critical port for grain exports.  Russia’s full-scale invasion and atrocities since February 2022 will be addressed in other appropriate forums.  But these two issues, Russia’s unlawful full-scale invasion and Russia’s UNCLOS violations in the Sea of Azov, Black Sea, and Kerch Strait, have something fundamental in common.   Both reflect Russia’s contempt for international law as it tries to return to the days of the Soviet Union, and before that the Russian Empire. 
• But Ukraine will never return.  Under UNCLOS, all States have rights of navigation, the duty to protect the environment, and the obligation to respect the common cultural heritage of humankind.  As Article 89 states, “[n]o State may validly purport to subject any part of the high seas to its sovereignty.”  These are straightforward rules that this Tribunal is called upon to apply.
• There are simple questions at the core of this dispute:  can one nation unilaterally remove a large body of water — an entire sea — from the legal regime established under UNCLOS?  Ukraine will demonstrate this week that the answer to this question can only be “no.”
• The sea that Russia has tried to take for itself is, of course, the Sea of Azov.  And the gateway to that sea is the Kerch Strait.  This international strait connects the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea, the other principal body of water at issue in this dispute.  The Kerch Strait has been used as a route of trade, travel, and cultural exchange for millennia, by the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and many others.  In modern times, tens of thousands of vessels transited the strait each year.  It provides critical access to Mariupol and Berdyansk, important ports in eastern Ukraine, which for decades have supplied Ukraine’s industrial heartland with essential commodities and served as export hubs for Ukrainian steel and minerals.
• Across this open, vital sea route, the Russian Federation has illegally built a permanent impediment to transit, an exceptionally low bridge.  The bridge is lower than suggested by Russia’s own studies; lower than requested by Russia’s own industrial interests; and lower than any bridge built or even proposed in modern times over an international strait.  As a result, some of the most important classes of vessels used in international trade can no longer pass through the Strait.  The kind of vessels that carried Ukrainian steel, grain, and other foodstuffs to the rest of the world.  Today, this bridge not only impedes transit passage, but Russia uses this illegal bridge to send a steady stream of military weapons and supplies to the Crimean peninsula. 
• Russia wants to take the Sea of Azov and Kerch Strait for itself, and so it has built a great gate at their entrance, to keep international shipping out while allowing small Russian river vessels in.  Russia now views the Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov, and perhaps even parts of the Black Sea, as its proprietary waters.  Russia wants these waters to be viewed as part of its 21^st century empire.  And while you will hear Russia’s experts say the Sea of Azov is similar to a lake or a river, Ukraine does not accept this, and neither should this Tribunal.  The Sea of Azov is not a lake or a small river delta.  It is over 37,000 square kilometers of semi-enclosed sea.  The bridge is unlawful, and it must come down.  The Kerch Strait should be returned to its status before this illegal threat to navigation began.
• There are other simple questions at the core of this dispute.  Can Russia build a bridge — as well as a pipeline and an undersea cable — without evaluating the environmental consequences for this sensitive channel, and the two unique, semi-enclosed seas that it connects?  Can Russia threaten priceless artifacts, giving amateurs free reign amongst centuries‑old shipwrecks and encouraging quick photo-ops, including one featuring the Russian Head of State himself?  Again, the answers to these questions can only be “no.” 
• Unlike Russia, Ukraine has moved away from the past.  Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine as an independent state has considered UNCLOS as the basis of our maritime relations.  In 1992, we deposited with the United Nations coordinates of baselines for measuring Ukraine’s territorial sea and exclusive economic zone in the Sea of Azov.  It is well known that after the demise of the Soviet Union, Ukraine remained under pressure from its larger neighbor to maintain the Soviet status quo.  At the time the Sea of Azov Treaty was signed in 2003, for example, Russia was threatening the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine by constructing a dam linking Ukraine’s Tuzla Island to Russia’s Taman Peninsula in the Kerch Strait.  The text of the treaty does not reflect that Ukraine agreed to Soviet-style treatment of the Sea of Azov.  To the contrary, the text of the treaty shows that Ukraine was looking for a path forward, and the treaty’s primary purpose was to serve as a framework for future agreement on the proper treatment of the Sea of Azov.  Unfortunately, Russia never intended to work cooperatively with Ukraine.  Russia illegally takes what it wants, re-writes international law to its liking, and then demands that tribunals like this one accept what it says. As it has always done.
• Ukraine’s case is about the law of the sea, and only the law of the sea.  But even as we turn our focus and attention to the specific facts of this case for the next two weeks, it is Russia that will try to distract the Tribunal by shifting the focus away from Russia’s unlawful conduct before its full-scale invasion in February 2022.  Instead, Russia will talk about a “change of circumstances”; about a new “sovereignty dispute” concerning the coast of the Sea of Azov.  When you hear about the alleged change of circumstances in Mariupol, understand that means Russia’s two month, three week and five day siege of that port city of half a million people, its destruction of 90 percent of the residential buildings, and its killing of thousands.  When you hear about the alleged sovereignty dispute in eastern and southern Ukraine, understand that this alleged dispute is built upon atrocity:  the massacre in Bucha, torture in countless cities from Kharkiv to Kherson, the unlawful deportation of more than 20,000 children, the destruction of power and heating infrastructure in the dead of winter and, in the seas, a grain blockade aimed not at Ukrainians per se, but rather harming those who consume our food and agriculture exports. 
• While I and millions of Ukrainians live this war every day, the conduct at issue in this case predates Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion has no effect on your jurisdiction to hear this case.  Russia is asking you to allow it to benefit from those acts, to somehow shield its earlier unlawful conduct by what happened afterward.  Can a country unilaterally change the relevant time period of this dispute in an attempt to embrace its imperialist aspirations and escape the law of the sea that binds all states?  Once more, the answer can only be “no.”
• Let’s turn back to the law of the sea and the facts of this case.  We have talked already about Russia’s bridge over the Kerch Strait.  Russia has impeded passage through the Kerch Strait and navigation in the Sea of Azov in other ways, as well.  It has deployed armed men from its Border Guard to inspect more than 1,600 vessels bound for Ukraine, inspecting these vessels at rates far higher than inspections of vessels bound for Russia.  It imposed average delays of 40 hours on vessels seeking to transit to Ukrainian Sea of Azov ports; the waiting time for vessels heading to Russia was just three hours. It arbitrarily banned passage through the Kerch Strait to foreign government vessels for a period of six months.  It created a mandatory one-way passage regime in the Kerch Strait, and it restricted the pilotage regime such that only Russian vessels can now qualify for exemptions.  And those are just its violations in the area of free navigation.
• When it comes to the environment, Russia has acted recklessly.  It failed to undertake adequate assessments of the environmental impacts of any of its construction projects across the Kerch Strait.  It continues to hide the core of what it claims were assessments it conducted of its bridge and pipeline across the Kerch Strait, and it admits that it never assessed impacts arising from its installation of a submarine fiber optic cable at all.  Russia also admits that it has made no detailed environmental monitoring available on the ongoing environmental effects of the so-called Kerch Bridge, and it concedes that no monitoring reports were published or communicated to relevant international organizations with regard to its undersea cable and gas pipelines.
• And when it comes to underwater cultural heritage, Russia contradicts not only basic principles of preservation, but also basic norms of respect.  It disclaims any duty to protect objects of archaeological and historical interest that have been underwater for fewer than 100 years, arguing that it is not required to respect or cooperate with any other State when it comes to, for example, aircraft and shipwrecks dating from the Second World War.  It ignores the broad consensus in favor of in situ preservation of underwater artifacts.  And it allows amateur Russian divers to disturb, move, and remove priceless cultural treasures from centuries-old sites.  To Ukraine, these artifacts are the common heritage of humanity.  To Russia, they are props for photo opportunities.
• These actions are wrong; they are, once again, reckless; and they cannot be reconciled with UNCLOS.  Russia’s violations of UNCLOS do not just adversely affect Ukraine. For the many states that border the Black Sea, for the many states whose flagged vessels use the Kerch Strait, and for all the States Parties to UNCLOS, these fundamental principles of transit passage, freedom of navigation, environmental protection, and preservation of precious cultural artifacts must not be eroded by the unilateral actions of the Russian Federation and its disregard for international rules and norms.
• If the rules of UNCLOS are applied here, Russia cannot win.  So instead, Russia redoubles its claim of dominion over the Sea of Azov and Kerch Strait, arguing that all 37,600 square kilometers of the Sea of Azov constitute internal waters to which the Convention does not apply.  This Tribunal should not issue a ruling that would depart from the plain text of UNCLOS and recognize the largest area of pluri-State internal waters in the world — an area twenty times bigger than any other pluri-state internal waters recognized by the international community.  Such a ruling would imperil the rights of Ukraine, and also of the flag States of the many of vessels that have historically transported millions of tons of grain, steel, and other commodities to and from Mariupol and Berdyansk.
• Mr. President, Members of the Tribunal, Ukraine is here before you to seek justice and accountability.  Ukraine’s request of this Tribunal is a simple one.  We ask that you apply the Convention as it is written.  Under Article 293, you “shall apply this Convention” to the facts before you.  Exercise the mandatory jurisdiction that UNCLOS confers on you.  And for the small but important slice of Russia’s conduct that is before you — its violations of the law of the sea— hold Russia accountable. 
• Thank you for your attention today, and over the course of the next two weeks.