28 Europe The EconomistAugust 10th 2019
2W
ith theirengagingly rainbow-
coloured beaks, puffins are the star
attraction on the Faroe Islands. But
puffin boffins fear that their numbers are
falling so fast that in 20 years they may
have vanished from the archipelago. In
1997, estimates Jens-Kjeld Jensen, the
Faroes’ top puffin expert, the islands
were home to 1.5m of the birds; but now
their numbers are down by 80%. A tiny
uptick in numbers in the past two years
won’t be enough to save them, he fears.
Hunting has been part of the reason.
Ecologists are quick to rage at the Faro-
ese, sharing film of the traditional and
bloody slaughter of pilot whales, which
are not endangered. But no one protests
when puffin is on the menu at the is-
lands’ only Michelin-starred restaurant.The 18 islands comprising the Faroes
are home to 51,783 people who govern
themselves as an autonomous part of
Denmark. When they were poor, and
there were plenty of puffins, the Faroese
used to scoff more than 200,000 of the
birds a year. Twenty years ago, by which
time they were just a delicacy, they were
still roasting 100,000 a year. Now, says
Mr Jensen, the number is down to 1,000.
Hunting bans are in force in some areas,
but not nationally; and he thinks the
government won’t ban catching puffins
completely for fear of offending tradi-
tionalist voters.
Hunting may have sharply declined,
but other forces are at work. The Faroes
sit in the middle of a region, stretching
from Scotland to Norway to Iceland,
where the decline in puffin numbers is
also dramatic. One theory is that climate
change is taking a toll. Puffins feed their
young on sand eels and, suspects Sjurdur
Hammer, a conservation scientist at the
Faroese Environment Agency, sand eels’
nutritional value has gone down because
the seas are warmer, speeding up their
metabolism. In the future, laments Mr
Jensen, “the only place you will see a lot
of puffins is in the tourist office.”
Might tourism, in fact, help? Gudrid
Hojgaard, the Faroese government’s
tourism chief, says that since 2012 tourist
numbers have already doubled to
120,000 a year. She hopes that revenue
this year will be 800m kroner ($120m), a
considerable sum for such a thinly-
populated place. Apart from admiring
the wonders of nature, there is not a lot
for visitors to do. Better conserve those
puffins before it is too late.Well worth saving
The Faroes’ puffinsTORSHAVN
The adorable seabirds are in dangerPlease don’t eat meSea Breeze exercise, led by America and Uk-
raine, now in its 19th iteration. The exercise
posits that the nefarious state of Blackland,
a behemoth to the east, is fuelling an insur-
gency in Maroonland, a breakaway prov-
ince of Roseland. Ukraine, America, Roma-
nia, Bulgaria and Georgia play the good
guys. One of nato’s standing fleets, led by a
Canadian frigate, stands in for the foes. The
scenario requires little imagination. Since
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and inva-
sion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, 13,000 peo-
ple have died. Four Ukrainian soldiers died
in a rocket attack on August 6th.
That war explains why Ukraine’s naval
contribution to the drills has thinned out
in recent years. Ukraine’s navy, which was
headquartered in the Crimean port of Se-
vastopol, lost three-quarters of its person-
nel and warships virtually overnight. In the
wardroom of Hetman Sahaydachniy, a Uk-
rainian officer gestures to a silver plaque
which documents the ship’s eight captains
since 1993. Two names have been scratched
out. “They were traitors,” says the officer
bitterly. “One of them was appointed chief
of the navy. The next day we realised he had
defected to Russia. It was a blow to the
head.” Another setback came last Novem-
ber when Russia rammed and seized two
Ukrainian gunboats and a tug attempting
to enter the Sea of Azov, a body of water
shared between them.
Ukraine is now rebuilding. Its short-
term goal is a “mosquito fleet” of small, ag-
ile and affordable vessels to deter Russia in
coastal waters, rather than big and expen-
sive warships for the high seas. Two shiny
new patrol boats, bristling with guns, sat in
Odessa’s harbour on the country’s naval
day on July 7th. Stepan Poltorak, Ukraine’s
new minister of defence, and Vice-Admiral
Lisa Franchetti, commander of America’s
Europe-based Sixth Fleet, clambered into
one and cruised off. That is a vital relation-
ship for Mr Poltorak. In the past four years
92% of Ukraine’s military assistance has
come from America. This includes two pa-
trol boats presented in 2018, with another
pair due shortly. America is also beefing up
Ukrainian naval facilities east of Odessa to
take larger foreign warships.
However, Ukraine needs more than
arms. Its military culture prefers top-down
orders and centralised planning to the ini-
tiative and autonomy favoured in NATO
armed forces. “We still see remnants of the
Soviet command structure,” says a Swedish
officer who is mentoring the Ukrainians in
the operations centre of the exercise.
“We’re trying to teach an old dog new
tricks.” He says that corruption seems to be
down and the work ethic up. In past years,
the operations room would shut down in
the afternoon. “Some saw it as a vacation
down here.” Now it runs around the clock,
with Ukrainian officers doing more of the
heavy lifting.American and European support for Uk-
raine reflects a wider Western concern
about the balance of power in the Black Sea.
Russia had sent only one new warship to its
Black Sea fleet between 1991 and 2014, says
Dmitry Gorenburg, an expert at the Centre
for Naval Analyses, a think-tank, leaving it
“barely functional”. But since the seizure of
Crimea Russia has put the fleet on steroids,
adding half a dozen new submarines, three
frigates and a slew of missile-toting boats.
It has also stuffed Crimea full of missiles,
including the s-400 air-defence system,
making it far riskier for foreign ships and
planes in wartime.
That is changing. Carney’s visit to the
Black Sea was the fifth by an American war-
ship this year. Ships from nato’s standingfleets spent 120 days there in 2018, up from
39 in 2014 and 80 in 2017. There is a limit to
such naval shows of force; the Montreux
Convention, which dates back to 1936, sets
caps on the number, tonnage and length of
stay of foreign warships in the Black Sea.
But there is pushback on land, too. In June
the Pentagon announced a fresh $250m in
military aid for Ukraine, bringing the total
to $1.5bn over the past five years. In July
America moved Reaper surveillance
drones from Poland to Romania, putting
the whole Black Sea within reach. And from
October a Romanian will serve as nato’s
deputy secretary-general—the first official
from a Black Sea littoral state to do so in
nearly five decades. Those are comforting
thoughts for Ukraine’s sailors. 7