Tuzla lies in the middle of the strait, roughly halfway between the Kerch Peninsula to the west and the Taman Peninsula to the east. Officially it has no permanent town, but it was never quite empty either. Over the years it held a small border station, a fishing settlement with a scatter of garden plots, and two modest holiday resorts named Albatross and Two Seas. Power came from a pair of diesel generators; a store opened at the resort from May through October. Two concrete roads run the length of the island, and a pier reaches into the shallow water. It is the kind of place where summers are long and salt-scented and winters are lonely, a low horizon of sand and reeds where the two seas seem to meet across the flats.

For decades the strait's waters were shared and largely uncontested, but the island's precarious geography made it a flashpoint. In 2003, work began on a causeway reaching out from the Taman shore toward Tuzla, and the project drew intense scrutiny; the extra current it channeled worsened the erosion already gnawing at the island. Talks followed, the construction paused, and both sides eventually agreed to treat the strait and the Sea of Azov as shared internal waters. Engineers on both shores studied the shifting sands, dredged the channel, and built reinforcement structures to keep the fragile islet from washing away. Few pieces of ground so small have been so carefully measured, argued over, and defended against the patient force of the water itself.

In the end, the island's greatest role was as a foundation. When a great bridge was planned across the Kerch Strait - the longest in the region, opened to road traffic in May 2018 - Tuzla became its natural stepping stone, a solid point midway across the water where piers could be anchored and the long spans could pause. The bridge now sweeps past the island in a low white arc, linking the Crimean and Taman shores. Tuzla remains what it has always been: a fragile line of sand caught between two seas, reshaped by storms and by human hands, a small place that the strait keeps trying to reclaim and that people keep refusing to let go.