By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 10/4/24

Uriel Araujo, PhD, anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts

Finland and Estonia, two NATO countries, have recently signed an agreement about Baltic Sea security. Moreover, and more importantly, they have announced their intention to blockade the Gulf of Finland by closing it to Russian shipping. The Russian Foreign Ministry reacted by stating that Russia would regard any such action as a violation of maritime law. Establishing their boundaries (pertaining to the Gulf of Finland’s contiguous zones) would be within their sovereign rights, of course. However, restricting maritime shipping the way they intend to do cannot be described as anything else than a violation of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – with potential serious consequences.

The Gulf of Finland extends to Saint Petersburg in Russia to the east. Its southern coast contains a network of ports plus the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant. The port of Primorsk at the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland is important for oil products, for example – there are several others. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the gulf for Russia. For one thing the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline began in Finnish waters.

With that said, as  Pavel Klachkov (Russian political scientist and a Financial University director) remarks, NATO’s military presence is increasing in the Baltic region, which is such a strategic area for Russia as well. In April, for instance, NATO joint military exercises commenced in Lithuania. Finland’s accession to the Alliance, he argues,  gave “new momentum to the northern direction, where conditions are being created for a potential conflict between NATO and Russia.” The Atlantic Alliance has also begun setting up a headquarters in Mikkeli, a Finnish city, which lies very close to the Russian border.

 He adds: “Since Finland joined the North Atlantic Alliance, it has quickly integrated into its operational structure and actively participates in exercises. These maneuvers are not merely a show of force — they are a rehearsal for possible military conflict scenarios with Russia. NATO’s active operations in the Kola Peninsula and the Gulf of Finland, both in close proximity to Russia’s borders, are particularly notable.”

Moreover, NATO exercises have been rehearsing the blockade of key routes for Russia – both the Suwalki Gap and the Gulf of Finland are crucial for supplying Russia’s northwestern regions. This is the larger context behind the recent Finnish-Estonian announcement.

After the 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid, Biden famously said that Russian President Vladimir Putin was looking for the “Finlandization of Europe”, but would instead get the “NATOization” of that continent. With the accession of Sweden and Finland, the Atlantic Alliance’s territorial reach has extended as far out as the Russian eastward Arctic flank, thereby making Russia the only non-NATO country in the Arctic. Many Western journalists and commentators would be quick to dismiss the aforementioned Russian political scientist’s analysis about NATO enlargement as “Russian propaganda”. However, going back in time a bit, in December 2019, Mark Cancian (a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies) wrote that “it’s time to stop NATO expansion. He commented back then on the American support for North Macedonia’s membership in the NATO alliance, and wrote that “a larger NATO embroils the United States in obscure regional disputes, commits it to defend exposed countries, and unnecessarily antagonizes the Russians.” Voices like that of Cancian or – to name a more famous Western political scientist – that of John Mearsheimer have largely been ignored by American policy-makers. This is unfortunate.

In November 2020 I wrote that, under Joe Biden’s presidency, Washington would pursue the policy of countering and encircling Russia, bringing changes not only in US relations to Ukraine and Eastern Europe, but to the entirety of Europe. At the time, tensions were rising in most – if not all – countries neighboring Russia. For one thing, in September 2020 NATO troops took part in provocative military exercises in Estonia near the Russian border.

Earlier that same year Washington sent no less than 20,000 troops to Europe to take part in the NATO exercise “Defender Europe 20”, It involved 18 countries across 10 European nations, including Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Georgia (all of which share a border with the Russian Federation). It was described as the “largest military exercises on the continent since before the end of the Cold War.” From 2020 onwards things intensified considerably – with vast consequences for the continent and the whole world.

Considering all of this, it is really quite impossible to disregard Russian concerns and complaints about NATO expansion (or about Ukraine’s relations with the Alliance, for that mere) as nonsense or mere rhetoric. From a Russian perspective, those are of course valid concerns pertaining to its national security and vital interests. The Atlantic Alliance appetite for growth since at least 1999, with its breach of the 1990 promise, has in fact been one of the main causes of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine since 2014. One could arguably reason that Moscow’s main goals (culminating in the 2022 campaign) have been basically a response to that.

Ukraine is of course a focal point for tensions due to many reasons, historically. NATO-Russian tensions however extend way beyond the Ukrainian question. There is indeed a lot of room for escalating such frictions in the Northern flank of the Alliance. And the US-led West seems to be bent on doing precisely that – which once again makes the world a less secure place.

Source: InfoBrics