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The fact that so many leaders have descended on a capital overlooking the sea reflects the growing significance of the Baltic in the West’s political, economic and security architecture. The murky depths of the Baltic are now on the front-line of the growing West-Russia standoff.
All of this has a new feel to it. Given that key Russian naval facilities lie on the Baltic, the sea has always had a geo-political significance and those old enough to remember the 1980s might recall the Swedish Navy occasionally dropping depth charges in the hunt for errant Soviet submarines. But the sea, in a way, played second-fiddle to the Pacific, the Atlantic and Mediterranean, where mighty U.S. carrier groups prowled the waters, readied to unleash hell at a moment’s notice.
Times have changed. First, the burgeoning and flourishing economies of Poland and other Baltic states have spurred on trade in the Baltic. According to Julian Pawlak, a research associate at the Bundeswehr University Hamburg and a research fellow at the German Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies, around 15% percent of global container shipping crosses the Baltic, around 2,500 vessels a day.
The enhanced trade, economic and political ties between the Baltic countries have led to cables and pipelines being laid across the sea’s bed. The three Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania), for example, have made significant investments in undersea power cables to bring in the electricity they are unable to produce at home.
The three countries are also now in the process of decoupling themselves from the Russia-led BRELL power network (which dates back to Soviet days) and so will become even more dependent on energy from undersea cables.
But the biggest factor changing the Baltic Sea’s geo-political landscape has been Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Western sanctions imposed because of the war have led to the rise of a Russian shadow fleet of vessels. These ships, unregulated and uninsured by conventional Western providers, are used by Moscow to dodge oil and gas sanctions. Many of them use the Baltic and, as a consequence, have to be monitored by the navies of NATO states.
This monitoring has been made easier by another factor that has changed the face of Baltic security; Sweden and Finland’s NATO accession. For decades robustly neutral, the two countries hot-footed their way into the alliance in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine and nervousness triggered by the Kremlin’s penchant for neo-imperialistic saber-rattling aimed at Russia border states.
The arrival of the two in NATO has almost completed the alliance’s encirclement of the Baltic and enhances the West military capabilities. Finland alone brings a navy over 30 ships, all of which are designed to operate and fight in the shallow and confined waters of the Baltic.
These capabilities are already being employed in another key factor in Baltic security; the protection of the forementioned cables and pipelines.
Recent damage, believed to be resulting from sabotage carried out by a shadow fleet vessel, to some cables off the coast of Finland has forced NATO to concentrate on the risks posed to the increasingly vital submarine infrastructure.
Arriving for the Helsinki conference both Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, and Edgars Rinkēvičs, the Latvian president, referred to the need to protect infrastructure from attack.
Despite the fact that NATO states control much of the Baltic and its key choke points (one between Estonia and Finland, one in Danish waters and the last in the narrow straits between Denmark and Sweden) protecting their physical and political interests poses several challenges.
The countries, for instance, don’t control the sea in its entirety, and peacetime maritime law allows the freedom of navigation for all vessels. Russia has, it appears, with last year’s attack on the cables demonstrated its willingness and ability to use civilian ships to carry out military operations.
Also, the sea is big and the NATO-state navies, despite their combined strength, will be unable to be everywhere at the same time. Even with the addition of Royal Navy ships from the U.K. as part of the newly established Joint Expeditionary Force, NATO will still lack the capability to provide the complete security needed to keep all undersea infrastructure safe all the time.
The Russian Navy may have taken a hammering at the hands of the shipless Ukrainian Navy in the Black Sea but has retained, apparently, the means to tamper with cables and pipelines.
In an article published in 2023 by Royal United Services Institute, a British think-tank, Sidharth Kaushal wrote that “Russia has spent a considerable amount of effort investing in capabilities that would allow it to pose a threat to European critical infrastructure, and has viewed this as an imperative since the Soviet era.”
“An emphasis on demonstrating the ability to target economically vital assets can be found in Russian thinking on escalation management, which presumes – correctly or otherwise – that the ability to inflict economic harm represents a means of containing local conflicts on Russia’s periphery by deterring external intervention,” he added.
How to counter this threat is high on the agenda at the Helsinki conference.
