Kerch Strait

Down by roughly nine tenths

No other chokepoint in this set has fallen this far. Against its 2019–2023 baseline the Kerch Strait carries a small fraction of what it once did, and unlike the Red Sea routes the traffic has not reappeared elsewhere — there is nowhere else for it to go. Kerch is the only way between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

Two hundred days with nothing at all

Across the record, 200 separate days registered no vessel transiting — and they are not scattered evenly. The longest unbroken run began on 13 January 2024 and lasted ten days.

Its quietest stretch came later that year: for the thirty days ending 14 November 2024 the strait averaged 0.23 transits a day, or seven vessels across the whole month.

For scale, the Strait of Hormuz has three days at zero in its entire record, all of them in 2026.

The decline started before the obvious date

The sharpest single month in the record is November 2021, when the daily average fell from 50 to 28. That is before the February 2022 invasion, and it is the reason this page reports the whole series rather than a comparison with last year: a route that has been falling for years has no useful “normal” in recent memory to be measured against.

The Bosporus, at the other end of the Black Sea, tells a milder version of the same story.