Press
Moscow is using deliberate provocation to harass the Baltic Sea states. GPS interference, risky flight maneuvers on the NATO border and verbal threats have been increasing for months.
On Sunday, June 2, Finnair will fly to Estonia’s second largest city Tartu for the first time in weeks. The Finnish airline had interrupted the connection after the pilots of a scheduled flight to Tartu lost their bearings shortly before landing at the end of April. The reason: digital sabotage of the GPS flight control system at the city’s airport, presumably originating from the St. Petersburg region. For months, the website gpsjam.org emitted GPS jamming signals over a large area of the Baltic Sea – what is now known in the scene as the “Baltic Jammer”. After the incident, Tartu quickly converted the airport to a GPS-independent guidance system.
The GPS jammer is just one of many pinpricks with which Russia’s president Wladimir Putin is deliberately causing unrest in the Baltic region. Russia is waging a “shadow war” against the West, said Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas a few days ago. The West must better coordinate its response to counter the Russian threat. “How far will we let them go on our soil?” asked Kallas. According to Western intelligence information, Russia is planning to intensify its acts of sabotage in Europe even further, for example to disrupt arms deliveries to Ukraine.
Russia’s tactics in the Baltic region: pinpricks and tactical games
Basically, Russia’s position in the Baltic Sea region has been Ukraine War However, it has become weaker: except for Russia itself, since the accession of Finland and Sweden, all the countries bordering the sea have NATO-members. And so Putin is currently only left with provocative fomentation to ensure a permanent atmosphere of alarm. Putin has also been intensifying his rhetoric against Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for months. Estonia in particular is repeatedly the target. In May, Russia removed several light buoys from the border river Narva to mark the fairway and the country’s border. These buoys are in the river there every summer. Estonia had just deployed them and was now protesting against the sabotage.
Moscow also sends fighter jets with their transponder signals switched off to the edges of NATO airspace several hundred times a year – especially in the Baltic Sea, including in the direction of Germany. The response to this is always that so-called alert squadrons take off – for example from Rostock-Laage airport – which force the Russian pilots back into international airspace. Meanwhile, rusty oil tankers are bustling around off the Swedish Baltic Sea island of Gotland, either being refueled with marine diesel, pumping Russian crude oil from one tanker to the next – or simply bobbing around provocatively.
Neighbouring countries have so far reacted confidently
Finland and Sweden have long been warning of environmental damage and espionage by the Russian “shadow tankers”. In addition, there is ominous damage to underwater pipelines between Finland, Sweden and Estonia in October 2023, which the affected states also attribute to Russian sabotage.
So far, the neighboring countries have reacted calmly to the provocations and not with the excitement or even panic that Moscow had hoped for. For example, when the official Russian news agency Tass recently reported that Moscow was considering moving the borders in the Baltic Sea off the Kaliningrad exclave in Russia’s favor. Sweden, Finland and other neighboring countries immediately rejected the plan. Moscow then dropped the proposal.
Russia: From Moscow’s perspective, NATO is militarily superior
Taken individually, each individual pinprick is bearable. But together they can be part of a larger plan by Putin to permanently destabilize NATO. Russia would probably want to avoid a conventional war against NATO, says Minna Ålander, security expert at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs in Helsinki. Instead, it could “try to incapacitate the alliance by other means, according to the motto ‘winning the war without fighting the war’. We are already seeing signs of this in Russia’s diverse hybrid warfare against many European countries,” Ålander said in an interview with IPPEN.MEDIA.
In general, NATO is capable of repelling a military attack from Russia if it positions itself correctly with the new defense plans and maintains Moscow’s superiority in conventional weapons, Ålander believes. “In this debate, people often forget what the situation looks like from the Russian perspective,” she says. “From there, it doesn’t look good for Russia at all.”
The expert expects Russia to act very differently against NATO than against Ukraine. “For example, by starting a limited military campaign somewhere in NATO territory – and then issuing NATO with a nuclear ultimatum in the hope of undermining the guarantee of mutual assistance under Article 5,” says Ålander. “The idea is that the USA would not be prepared in principle to risk a (nuclear) war against Russia for a piece of the Baltics.” However, by joining, Finland and Sweden have also strengthened the voices of the far north-east within NATO for more protection on the eastern flank. And that is not good news for Moscow.
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