Russia is up to so much mischief around the Baltic Sea that even the things that it ends up not doing cause Western alarm bells to ring.
In just the past few days, Russia has floated a now-you-see it, now-you-don’t unilateral plan to change its maritime borders with Lithuania and Finland; tried to sneak its way closer to Estonia; and spooked the head of the Swedish Armed Forces so hard that he publicly feared for the safety of Gotland, Sweden’s biggest Baltic island.
All that came on the heels of a broadening campaign of apparent Russian sabotage across the region, including mysterious fires, disrupted trains, and damaged undersea pipelines. A Russian spy ship is heading to the Gulf of Finland to keep an eye on things. The Norwegian police just warned about a new Russian campaign to sabotage Western arms deliveries to Ukraine, invoking the same “see something, say something” public warnings used for terrorist outfits. Due to sabotage fears, Poland had to increase security at the main airport that transports aid deliveries to Ukraine. All the while, Russian efforts to jam GPS signals for commercial aviation in the region continue apace.
Together, the Russian moves are meant to test boundaries—sometimes literally—as well as provoke a response, distract its neighbors, and swarm the West with the kitchen sink of full-spectrum harassment. For Russia, the battlefield is most certainly not limited to Ukraine, and when it comes to expanding it, the Baltic region holds a special place both in Russia’s imperialist past and Moscow’s expansionist present.
“The last time Russia had this little access in the Baltic was centuries ago,” said Charly Salonius-Pasternak, a researcher with the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. In Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mind, “for Russia to be recognized as a great power, it must be dominant in the Baltic Sea. That clearly wasn’t the case before NATO expansion, and now is even less so.”
The moves afoot aren’t the traditional kind of land grabs, such as the ones that Russia previously pulled off in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and is now attempting with the rest of the country. But it may be Putin’s marker for a new kind of low-intensity campaign, Salonious-Pasternak said.
“Somewhere in his mind, he may have this idea, not to do what the USSR did, but to cause continuous mayhem until he has the resources to do something about it,” he added.
Consider the curious case of the Russian bid to change its maritime borders with Lithuania and Finland. The Russian Defense Ministry released the proposal publicly, but it mysteriously disappeared in less than a day; Russian officials denied that they were seeking to change the border. But the very notion sparked a furious response from Russia’s neighbors—Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis called it “an obvious escalation against NATO and the EU”—while the whole spat highlighted the difficulties of dealing with such inchoate threats.
“To me, it looks like a provocation,” said Martin Kragh, a senior research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. “No matter how the West responds, it will have an effect at a very low cost for Russia. If the West makes a strong response, it can use that for domestic and international propaganda purposes; if they don’t, Russia can exploit that, arguing the claims are legitimate. It’s a ‘heads-I-win, tails-you-lose’ situation.”
The small changes to the maritime map may not have come to pass yet, but the Baltic states and several other NATO neighbors are taking no chances with what Kragh calls Russia’s strategy of “creeping annexation.”
Over the weekend, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—alongside Finland, Norway, and Poland—announced plans for a “drone border wall” to protect against Russia’s encroachments and destabilizing maneuvers on the borders by enhancing video surveillance of the sprawling frontier. Estonia, like Norway, has also stepped up its public warnings about Russian misbehavior on the border and regional sabotage more broadly. NATO held the first meeting of its new Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network last week, with a particular eye on Russia. Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is otherwise engaged, took the time while speaking to reporters over the weekend to recognize the clear and present danger that Russian designs pose to the Baltics.
To make sense of why Russia, with a grinding war on its hands in Ukraine, is busy making mischief in the Baltic Sea requires understanding both what’s new and what’s eternal for Russia’s regional objectives.
What’s new is that with the accession of Finland and Sweden to the Western alliance since early 2023, the Baltic has become, for all intents and purposes, a NATO lake, with member states now ringing the entire body of water— with the exception of a bit of Russia. Though Putin downplayed the significance of that seismic shift at the time, and some Western commentators stress the need for even more NATO vigilance in the region despite the expansion, the geostrategic shift was fundamental.
As a result, Russia realizes that due to its own actions in Ukraine, it has lost ground in an area crucial to its international power projection. That’s why it is lashing out in the region, albeit haphazardly, as a French report noted in November 2023 and a Norwegian intelligence assessment put it earlier this year.
“If you want to undermine the collective West, then these regions—the Gulf of Finland, Estonia, Lithuania—all those territories are easy to access for Russia,” Kragh said. “They don’t have any other borders when it comes to challenging the West.”
But the reason that the loss of the Baltic hurts Russia so much, and Putin in particular, is not just because of Finland and Sweden’s military might (Sweden just gave Ukraine a massive arms assistance package) and the reach of geography. There is also the weight of history.
Since the time of Peter the Great, Putin’s self-styled role model, Russia’s window to the West (and to great-power status) has come through the chilly waters of the Baltic. Russian imperial aspirations in the 18th and 19th centuries came through the defeat of Sweden and the vassalization of Finland. Later, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, when not busy carving up Eastern Europe otherwise, briefly made a postwar bid for Bornholm, a strategic Danish island. Putin will be hard-pressed to make Russia great again if he can’t scrape back a semblance of power in the Baltic.
“Of course it’s a blow to have the Baltic Sea turned into a NATO lake. The Baltic has been a crucial objective of Russian and Soviet foreign and military policy since the time of Peter I,” said Norman Naimark, a historian at Stanford University who has written about Bornholm and other Soviet adventures. “Putin is also a Leningrader, which means that he has a special eye on access to the Baltic and egress into and out of the belts and the sound,” he said, referring to the critical straits connecting the Baltic to the wider world.
Russia’s neighbors haven’t been shy about calling out Moscow’s latest provocations. But that doesn’t mean that the mischief will stop any time soon, as long as it offers Putin a way to redress, even partially, what he sees as a geographic and historic imbalance.
“What is fascinating is the innovation in the Russian toolbox. They keep finding new ways of pushing,” Kragh said. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole—you keep hitting them, and they pop up somewhere else. The Baltic Sea simply provides a very good and opportunistic area for them to operate in.”
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