The Russian Black Sea Fleet will have a new permanent base in the self-proclaimed republic of Abkhazia, a rebel province of Georgia that only Russia and a handful of countries recognize as an independent state. The corresponding agreement has already been signed, said the president of this territory, Aslan Bzhania, in an interview published this Thursday by the Russian newspaper Izvestia.
The leader made this statement a day after meeting with the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin, however, has not commented on this matter and its spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, referred this Thursday to the Ministry of Defense for everything related to it.
“We have signed an agreement and in the near future in Ochamchira Bay we will have a permanent location for the Russian Navy,” Bzhania said. In the first decade of this century, Ochamchira was used as a joint base for civil and military ships of the Abkhazian Navy.
In January 2009 those facilities were transferred to Russia. Already then it was proposed to build a base there for the Russian navy, but the idea did not prosper. Currently, patrol boats and coast guard boats of the Russian FSB operate there. Ochamchira is located 60 kilometers from Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia.
With the installation of a permanent base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the defense capacity of both Russia and Abkhazia will increase, said the leader of this breakaway region of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
Moscow recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries in 2008, after a five-day war in August in which Russian troops repelled an attempt by Georgia to forcibly retake South Ossetia, a region that lived with its back to the Tbilisi authorities since their victory in the war of the 90s.
Georgia considers those territories as its own provinces. And that is the position held by most of the international community and the UN. In addition to Russia, the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia has been recognized only by Venezuela, Nicaragua, Nauru and Syria.
Bzhania praised the military cooperation between the authorities in Moscow and Sukhumi. “Russia supports us, our specialists are constantly improving their qualifications in special institutions in Russia, so this issue, of course, never leaves the agenda,” he said.
News of the development of a naval base in Ochamchira could indicate that Moscow is looking for alternatives to Sevastopol, where the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet is located. This port, on the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014, has been a permanent target of Ukrainian forces since Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to intervene militarily in Ukraine in February 2022.
Parallel to Bzhania’s interview in Izvestia, The Wall Street Journal has published that Russia has withdrawn most of its Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol due to Ukrainian attacks.
When journalists asked Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov about this issue this Thursday, he responded that he was not going to make any further comments except to indicate that questions about naval maneuvers should be directed to the Ministry of Defense.
At the time of the Soviet Union, Moscow already had a naval base in Ochamchira. Since the 1930s, it served as a base for border ships of the Transcaucasian military district. Since the 1960s, there was a patrol boat brigade, which carried out tasks to protect the state border until 1996. It then moved to the city of Kaspisk, in the Russian republic of Dagestan, on the Caspian Sea.
