Insurance Premiums, Not Warships, Stop the Shipping
Ukraine has stopped using commercial shipping in the Sea of Azov through sustained drone strikes that achieved what looks like permanent strategic control—but this misunderstands what actually happened and what happens next.
The real precedent is Iran's Tanker War from 1984 to 1988. During the final years of the Iran-Iraq conflict, Iran attacked merchant shipping using speedboats and missiles—and Iran couldn't defeat the Iraqi navy or American escorts. What Iran could do was raise the cost of transit.
Insurance premiums on Gulf tankers climbed from $3,000 per voyage in 1980 to $270,000 by 1988. That was the weapon—not destruction, but economics. The mechanism is identical now. Ukraine's drones don't control the Azov, they make shipping there prohibitively expensive relative to alternatives.
Russia can absorb losses of individual vessels, but it cannot absorb the cost of insurance, minesweepers, and constant escorts indefinitely. So shipping stops voluntarily—the corridor closes not because Ukraine owns it but because Russia decides it costs too much to keep using it. Iran's campaign collapsed not when its military capacity disappeared but when the calculus flipped. In 1988, Gulf states demanded American and Soviet escorts specifically because convoy protection was now cheaper than insurance, shipping resumed. The pressure evaporated.
The corridor closes not because Ukraine owns it but because Russia decides it costs too much to keep using it.
Ukraine faces the same arithmetic now. Its drones will maintain pressure only as long as the cost of deploying them remains lower than Russia's cost of sustaining countermeasures—insurance, new shipping routes, better air defense, convoy escorts. The question is not whether Ukraine's drones work. They do. The question is whether Ukraine can maintain higher attack frequency than Russia can absorb insurance costs. That is a question of industrial capacity, not strategy.
