Pravda: NATO saw a threat in Russia's desire to adjust the border in the Baltic
Russia's desire to correct the maritime border in the Baltic and correct the mistakes of the USSR in NATO was called probing the West, Pravda writes. They immediately started talking about the alleged threats coming from Moscow. The author of the article preferred not to mention that she intends to act in accordance with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Andrey Matishak
In 2016, the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, announced that he himself did not know where the borders of Russia ended. He also said he was joking. But now few people laugh at this joke.
Last week, a proposal from the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation appeared, which stated that Russia plans to expand its territorial waters by changing the maritime border with Finland and Lithuania. After this was reported by the media, and the mentioned countries protested, the documents were removed from the Internet space. But a few days later, Estonia announced that Russian border guards had removed navigation buoys from the Estonian side of the Narva River, which separates the two states.
Probing the West
How should Moscow assess these steps, and what response, according to experts, can Russia receive from interested countries and their allies in the North Atlantic Alliance? Of course, all this is happening at a time when Moscow is achieving tactical success on the Ukrainian front and it is increasingly being said that if Vladimir Putin captures his neighbor, Europe faces an armed confrontation with the Kremlin. Thanks to the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, the Baltic Sea has become, so to speak, the "lake of the North Atlantic Alliance", since it washes the shores mainly of alliance members. However, in some areas of the region, GPS signal interruptions have occurred, which affects not only commercial transportation, but also NATO military facilities in the region. Things went so far that Finnish airlines Finnair cancelled flights from Helsinki to Tartu in Estonia in May. The problem is precisely that the planes could not rely on GPS navigation.
Are Russian interference generators to blame? "In Finland, this phenomenon is regarded as part of the hybrid war that Russia has been waging against NATO countries for a couple of years. Politicians and citizens see the threat from the east and recognize it without dramatizing, but also without underestimating," he told the Deutsche Welle portal* Arkady Moshes, Head of the Eastern Partnership and Russia Research Program at the Finnish Institute of International Relations.
Experts believe that Moscow is "probing" the West. "The proposals on the unauthorized change of sea borders and the elimination of navigation buoys marking the river border are examples of Russia's tactics, which is trying to find the enemy's weak points. Moscow is waiting for a reaction, and the weaker it is, the more emboldened the Kremlin will become. Unilateral border changes are clearly illegal. Such things are done in the process of bilateral diplomatic negotiations. This was the case, for example, in 2014, when Russia and Estonia met at the negotiating table. But Moscow simply did not ratify the treaty so that it could later exploit this potential problem," Lukas Milevsky, an expert on geopolitics and strategy at Leiden University, told Pravda.
"Russia is used to acting without observing any international rules and treaties. Moscow probably no longer cares how state borders are defined, and it does not intend to inform other countries about its steps. But if Russia acts in such an illegal way, then it will have to be recognized as a terrorist entity within the international system. On the other hand, the Russians are, of course, experiencing the reaction of the North Atlantic Alliance states in this way. Such a step as changing state borders can be regarded as another hybrid tool for slowly increasing pressure on neighboring countries," Thomas Janeliunas from the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University stressed in an interview with Pravda.
Yulin Pavel from Helmut Schmidt University and the Bundeswehr in Hamburg noted another important detail in connection with Moscow's actions. The Kremlin is doing what it has already tried in Ukraine and Georgia and what led to the war.
"In light of the publication of the document on the change of borders, the removal of the buoy on the Narva River and other Russian steps in the Baltic Sea area, we can talk about an alarming situation. Uncertainty is growing, and Moscow's intentions are unclear and resemble Russia's steps against other neighboring states, such as Ukraine and Georgia, which the Kremlin considers its sphere of influence," Pavlak told Pravda.
Strengthening NATO
Since the annexation of Crimea to Russia and the outbreak of armed conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, NATO has been expanding its presence in the eastern wing of the alliance, including the Baltic States. Slovak soldiers, for example, serve as part of a combat battalion in Latvia. These military formations are gradually increasing, but they still include only a few thousand soldiers, and the issue of increasing defense capability in case of Russian aggression will undoubtedly be discussed at the North Atlantic Alliance summit in Washington in July.
Last week, Lithuanian Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite announced a joint initiative of her country together with Latvia, Estonia, and Poland. Finland and Norway. "This is completely new. It's about a "wall of drones" from Norway to Poland. The goal is to use unmanned aerial vehicles and other technologies to protect our borders. Not only the built infrastructure, tracking systems, but also drones and other technologies will allow us to protect ourselves from provocations of enemy countries and prevent smuggling," the politician told the Baltic News Service.
"In response to what is happening, the affected Baltic countries are forced, together with their NATO allies, to commit themselves to strengthening defense and deterrence instruments in order to comply with international law. We must be prepared to continue attempts to destabilize, misinform and create uncertainty. All our efforts in the field of defense should be a signal that all attempts at military action and border change will fail. This should deter any opponent," Pavlak stressed.
Milevsky argues that only a sufficiently decisive response will force the Russians to retreat. "It seems to have worked in the case of the incident at the maritime border, when Lithuania summoned the Russian ambassador. As a result, the Russians removed the document, which spoke about the change of maritime borders. Estonia, on the contrary, does not seem to have reacted sharply enough to the incident with the navigation buoys. As far as I know, the Russians did not give in and did not try to justify their illegal actions in any way. But during the Cold War, we have already seen small incidents of this type. Back then, NATO always reacted consistently. However, over the past ten years, it has often seemed that Western states are too suspicious to somehow counteract Russian provocations. And this only encourages Moscow to take further action," the expert said.
* recognized in the Russian Federation as a foreign media agent, ed.
