Naval clash has Ukraine declaring martial law

MOSCOW — Ukraine’s president put his nation on a war footing with Russia on Monday, as tensions over a shared waterway escalated into a crisis that dragged in NATO and the United Nations.

Russia’s seizure a day earlier of three small Ukrainian naval vessels and 23 sailors — including at least three wounded in a shooting by the Russian side — was the first overt armed conflict between the two sides since the beginning days of the conflict in 2014, when Russian special forces occupied Crimea.

The opening of an additional front at sea, even if Ukraine lacks a real navy, introduced an unstable element into what had been a shadowy war. The conflict pitting Ukrainian soldiers against Russian-backed separatists in the breakaway Donbas region in eastern Ukraine has sputtered along for almost five years.

The Kremlin, along with some Ukrainian opposition figures, called the martial drumbeats echoing from Kiev a domestic political ploy by its embattled president, Petro Poroshenko. They accused him of fearmongering to delay or at least reconfigure the March 31 election that he had seemed certain to lose.

Poroshenko delivered a speech to Ukraine’s parliament asking it to approve the declaration of martial law starting Wednesday, with the military already on full alert. The attack on the naval vessels near the shared waterway, the Kerch Strait, represented a new stage of aggression in what he called Russia’s “hybrid war” against Ukraine. The declaration passed after the president agreed to dilute its scope.

Ukraine also received a boost from the international reaction, underscoring both the isolation of Russia from the West over the Ukraine conflict, and the desire to protect the international maritime convention that allows for unimpeded shipping through any strait.

At the United Nations, Russia called a session of the Security Council in an attempt to force a discussion about what it called Ukrainian violations of Russian territorial waters. But Western nations quickly turned the session into a long criticism of Russia for its actions against Ukraine since 2014.

“Impeding Ukraine’s lawful transit through the Kerch Strait is a violation under international law. It is an arrogant act that the international community must condemn and will never accept,” Ambassador Nikki Haley of the United States told the council.