Russia halts work on sea wall after Ukrainian show of force

The Russians were coming, with their bulldozers and their trucks full of dirt, bringing an invading sea wall through the Sea of Azov ever closer to Ukrainian shores. In response, Ukrainian border guards staged a show of force yesterday on the tiny island of Taman, in the disputed waters of the Kerch Strait, with shields and clubs and guard dogs. Jet fighters shot missiles into the sea. A dredge dug frantically in the path of the wall, scooping away the landfill as soon as it was dumped. With the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, heading home urgently from a trip to South America and with an international incident suddenly on their hands, the Russians yesterday ordered a halt to the wall in the Azov sea. They had meant nothing by it, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said. The 3-mile-long wall was being built purely for "economic and ecological reasons." But clearly there was something more at stake. Ivanov was due next week in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, for the latest in more than a dozen meetings this year over territorial disputes in the Azov sea and the Kerch Strait, with Ukraine's Crimean peninsula on one side and Russia on the other. Since September, trucks and bulldozers have been working around the clock, and they are now within easy binocular range of Taman Island. Control of the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov are among the last sensitive issues left unresolved in a border agreement signed in January by the two former Soviet republics. The strait is a key sea lane from the Azov to the Black Sea, Turkey and the Mediterranean. Russia wants to share sovereignty of the strait, but Ukraine claims a demarcation line that is costing Russia $200 million a year in shipping tolls, according to newspapers here.