Legend may have it that the dead Achilles was brought to rest on Serpents' Island alongside his lover Patroclus, but in the intervening millennia this speck of rock in the Black Sea, dozens of kilometres from the nearest landfall, has rarely experienced the bustleseen today.
The island, which belongs to Ukraine, sits at the apex of a 12m sq km triangle of seabed that contains an estimated 10m tonnes of oil and 100bn cu m of gas reserves, and its presence as an outcrop of Ukrainian territory in international waters has direct bearing on the outcome of a case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
