While the precise amount of revenues that Russia will forego by subsidizing gas sales to Ukraine will depend on world energy prices, it will likely reach several billions of dollars annually. However, retaining the Sevastopol base will allow Moscow to save some money by scaling down construction at
the new base for the Black Sea Fleet at the Russian port of Novorossisk.
The Russian Duma overwhelmingly ratified the agreement, with many legislators foreseeing significant political and military benefits from the arrangement.
The commander-in-chief of the Russian Navy, Vladimir Vysotsky, told reporters that the new deal will help restore Russian-Ukrainian naval cooperation against terrorism and trafficking, as well as through joint search-and-rescue activities.
Despite the controversy the agreement has provoked in Ukraine, where commentators have debated its constitutionality and economic costs, Western governments have not paid much public attention to the deal. This silence partly reflects a desire not to antagonize the new Ukrainian government or contest Ukrainians' right to determine their foreign policies without outside interference. But it also is due to the perception that the lease extension will not appreciably change the balance of power in the Black Sea region.
During the August 2008 Georgia War, vessels from Russia's Black Sea fleet, based at Sevastopol, deployed along the coast of Georgia's breakaway province of Abkhazia in a belated effort to support Russian military operations. They did not materially affect the course of the war. When NATO ships entered the Black Sea following the conflict to provide humanitarian assistance to the Georgian government, Russian officials accused NATO of covertly re-arming Georgia.
Adm. Eduard Baltin, former commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, boasted that the Russian Navy could destroy the NATO naval contingent within 20 minutes. But despite the bellicose rhetoric, no such attack occurred, and the Western ships soon departed.
Russia's dominance of the Black Sea is due less to its maritime might than to
the Montreux Convention, which severely constrains the presence of extra-regional navies in the Black Sea. Turkey has been very careful to apply these limitations to NATO warships so as not to antagonize Moscow or risk losing the unique privileges that the convention grants Turkey as owner of the Bosporus Straits. At times, Moscow and Ankara have even colluded to limit NATO's presence in the Black Sea. For example, when the alliance proposed to extend its Mediterranean-based Operation Active Endeavor into the region to counter terrorism, trafficking, and WMD proliferation, Russian and Turkish warships joined in Operation Black Sea Harmony to undertake the same missions, rendering any NATO role superfluous.
Most importantly, Moscow demonstrated in 2008 that, even with minimal naval and air support, Russian ground forces can overwhelm Georgia's defenses. Since then, Russia has enhanced its military potential against Georgia even further by constructing new frontline bases in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
At an April 22 news conference in Estonia, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that Ukraine's decision to extend the lease would not harm its prospect of eventually joining the alliance.
Rasmussen called the base deal "a bilateral agreement [that] will not have an impact on our relationship neither with Russia nor with Ukraine."
Rasmussen is correct that the NATO-Ukraine relationship will remain unaffected by the lease extension, though probably not for the reasons he suggested. On the one hand, Yanukovich had already made clear well before the base deal that he has no intention of joining NATO. Earlier this month, he went so far as to disband the government commission established to help prepare Ukraine for eventual membership.
On the other, while the gas subsidies will take effect now, a future Ukrainian government could annul the lease extension before 2017, when the current lease expires. Even after that date, a new government might try to revoke the extension by deeming it unconstitutional or citing other reasons. The Ukrainian opposition could thereby negate Moscow's political-military return on what by then would amount to an investment of billions of dollars in lost gas revenue.
Furthermore, the Sevastopol energy-for-base arrangement is unlikely to serve as a precedent for similar deals elsewhere. Notwithstanding invitations from Venezuela and other friendly governments to establish bases on their territory, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin described the Ukrainian package as a unique offer designed to restore good relations between two neighboring countries. "We have no need to build military bases around the world," Putin said. "I would ask our [energy] partners not to approach us with similar requests. The Crimea is a special case."
Whether keeping Russian sailors on the Crimea will promote or detract from Ukraine's ethnic harmony is unclear. Yanukovych could prove to be as fickle a partner for Moscow as Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, whose support for the Kremlin's policies varies depending on the level of Russian economic subsidies. In any case, the lease extension will not change the balance of military power in the Black Sea, which will remain dominated by the Russian Navy with or without the Sevastopol base.
**Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior editor. His weekly WPR column, Global Insights, appears every Tuesday. 
