Some shipping companies are stopping sending ships to Ukraine’s Sea of Azov ports for fear of expensive delays by Russian border guards

Some shipping companies are stopping sending ships to Ukraine’s Sea of Azov ports for fear of expensive delays by Russian border guards, Andrii Klymenko, a Crimea native who now chairs the Maidan of Foreign Affairs, tells The New York Times. In a report from Mariupol, the Times notes that one Lebanese ship waited 12 days at the south side of the Kerch bridge before winning Russian permission to enter the Azov. The story, by a Moscow-based reporter, notes that in October, a presenter on Channel One, Russia’s most widely watched TV station, started to refer to the Azov, a binational sea by treaty, as a Russian “inland sea.”