Kyiv, Ukraine – The first thing Maria Bubnova remembers about the Sea of Azov are the small boats she and her friends rented to travel across its warm and barely salty waters.
“It was our tradition – to get together once a year,” the dark-haired businesswoman, displaced person and mother of two told Al Jazeera.
These days, Azov is no longer a place of sad memories for Ukrainians like him. Russia confiscated it all after it invaded Ukraine in 2022, and hundreds of thousands of people fled.
Bubnova grew up in Mariupol, a southeastern city of about half a million people and Azov’s largest port. The world’s shallowest sea is the size of Switzerland and was divided between Ukraine and Russia after the Soviet collapse in 1991.
At the time, spas and resorts existed there along with two giant steel plants, which produced 40 percent of Ukraine’s steel and polluted the sea air.
Bypassing fishing flotillas and packed beaches, dozens of freighters ferried wheat, vegetable oil and coal as well as millions of tons of steel slabs to the Black Sea and as far away as the Mediterranean.
Azov’s approximately 1,500 km (932 mi) of Ukrainian coastline was a top budget destination for families with small children, who could safely frolic in knee-deep water with almost no waves.
Adults come to spas offering therapeutic mud and thermal waters to treat arthritis, skin conditions and allergies.
“Since the (Russian) tsars, people have come to Azov because it is therapeutic,” says Bubnova.
‘Didn’t take anything’
In 2011, Bubnova and her husband, Serhiy, began selling fruits and vegetables in Mariupol and then diversified into large-scale production of salads and pickles.
And then Russia started cutting off their trade.
In 2014, Moscow annexed the Crimea peninsula, the northeastern part of which surrounds Azov, and helped separatists create two authoritarian, economically stable “states” north of Mariupol.
They say, because of “border posts” and “customs offices” Bubnov can no longer sell his products there.
They received a grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to produce frozen soups, but the launch of that business failed due to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Mariupol was hit harder than any other Ukrainian city as Russian aircraft and artillery attacked the city around the clock, killing thousands of civilians and destroying its steel plant and other factories and businesses.
Bubnova’s family fled the city in mid-March that year.
“We didn’t take anything, nothing, we just left,” she says.
Millions of dollars worth of his equipment was destroyed in the shelling, and his apartment was taken over by Russian-appointed “officials”.
Bubnova and her two children fled to the Netherlands. They were among thousands of Ukrainians who left eastern Ukraine.
GDP is over
Ukraine lost all of Azov after the 2022 invasion. Within a few weeks, Russian forces occupied the entire coastline to create a “land bridge” to secure their control of Crimea.
Moscow declared Azov its “domestic sea”, and in 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree banning Ukraine from using the Azov.
The loss of Azov crippled Ukraine’s economy.
“The sea has always been of strategic economic importance for Ukraine, primarily as a hub of logistics and exports,” Maryna Horbyshevska, head of the department of management and finance at Mariupol State University, which has been relocated to Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
She also fled Mariupol in mid-March 2022.
She says Ukraine has lost about 10 to 12 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), but that the figure could be “much higher” due to the destruction of Mariupol metallurgical plants.
Including the mineral resources of other Russian-occupied territories north and east of Azov, Ukraine’s losses were worth $12.4 trillion, according to a survey by SecDev, a Canadian geopolitical risk firm, that was commissioned by the Washington Post in 2022.
The losses covered approximately two-thirds of Ukraine’s coal mines; two-fifths of its metals; a third of its rare earth minerals, including lithium; one-fifth of its natural gas; and 11 percent of its oil reserves, the survey found.
To secure its control over Azov, Moscow began building a cordon of roads and railroads around the sea.
For Moscow, the “acquisition” of Azov became a propaganda tool and a step in increasing state control over the economy.
“Russia uses the ‘inner sea’ slogan about Azov for propaganda purposes and includes spending on infrastructure (around it) to boost internal demand for state-initiated industrial production,” Kiev-based analyst Alexey Kush told Al Jazeera.
A pyrrhic victory standing over mass graves
But Ukraine’s loss does not necessarily translate into Russia’s gain.
Mariupol’s steel plants are in irreparable ruins, and their manufacturing processes, which require iron ore from central Ukraine, will rarely be completed again.
Kush says Russia’s advantage in terms of industrial assets amounts to “almost zero”, because now, Moscow can only use the industrial zone of the city of Melitopol, 200 km (124 mi) west of Mariupol.
Moscow is trumpeting the “restoration” of Mariupol, but Ukrainian officials say hastily constructed buildings stand over mass graves of murdered civilians.
Even though the air around Mariupol is clean, the sea water is in poor condition due to the destroyed sewage system and pollution caused by shelling.
Brain drain is also important as refugees from the region settle in other parts of Ukraine or the West.
After spending a year and a half in the Netherlands with her children, Bubnova was reunited with her husband and settled in Slavutych, a former company town for the closed Chernobyl nuclear power station, north of Kiev.
Like other displaced people, they must adapt to life in a new place with little money and few possessions, if any.
“I don’t know anything,” she says. “You have to make every effort to find yourself, to start working.”
After painstaking planning, she and her husband started a new company to make canned soups in pouches, and their 19-year-old daughter Alina developed a new recipe for Ukraine’s trademark beetroot soup, borscht.
A link to the Caspian?
There is a potential development that could dramatically escalate the geopolitical status of Azov and ruin Ukraine’s chances of reclaiming it.
In 2007, the Kremlin unveiled plans to build a canal between the Sea of Azov and the oil-rich Caspian Sea along a low-lying land that would have connected them millions of years ago.
The canal will provide Caspian countries like Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
If implemented, the project would rival the Suez Canal and increase Russia’s role in a region where China and Turkey are competing for influence.
“It will work against China, against Turkiye, partly also against Iran,” Kiev-based analyst Igor Tishkevich told Al Jazeera.
“If Russia comes out of the war (and) tries to sell this project to the United States as an infrastructure project that will limit China’s expansion, it is very bad for us,” he says, “because in this case, Ukraine will simply become a nuisance that will stand in the way (of the project) with demands to return its territories.”
