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Kyiv, Ukraine –<\/strong> The first thing Maria Bubnova remembers about the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov are the small boats she and her friends rented to travel across its warm and barely salty waters.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was our tradition \u2013 to get together once a year,\u201d the dark-haired businesswoman, displaced person and mother of two told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Adults come to spas offering therapeutic mud and thermal waters to treat arthritis, skin conditions and allergies.<\/p>\n \u201cSince the (Russian) tsars, people have come to Azov because it is therapeutic,\u201d says Bubnova.<\/p>\n