“NATO Inland Sea”: are the threats to close the Baltic to the Russian fleet real?

In the six months that have passed since the start of the Northern Military District in Ukraine, the military-political situation in the Baltic has radically changed, and the threat to Russian national security in this region has moved from the category of hypothetical to real and primary ones.

As you know, Sweden and Finland have sharply changed their previous neutral status and are now in the active phase of joining NATO. The decision on this has already been approved by the governing bodies of the Alliance, as well as the United States, and the fundamental obstacle in the form of the position of Turkey, from which the Scandinavians bought off by agreeing to the extradition of Kurdish political refugees who had settled with them, has been removed. So, despite a number of minor formalities that still need to be overcome, we can consider that Helsinki and Stockholm are already in NATO.

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What this changes for Russia also doesn’t need to be discussed. Firstly, this arrangement minimizes the historical achievements of Peter the Great, returning Russia in the Baltic actually, if not to pre-Petrine times, then close to it - never before in the last 300 years has Russian territorial control in the Baltic Sea been so insignificant. In fact, the Russian Baltic Fleet finds itself locked in the roadsteads of the Kaliningrad region and a small patch of the Gulf of Finland near St. Petersburg, which in itself narrows the operational space for military maneuver in the event of emergency situations.

Moreover, the Finns have already promised in advance that immediately upon joining the Alliance they will close the Baltic Sea to Russian warships. The same threats are coming from Estonia, which is directly adjacent to the Baltic Fleet bases in the north.

“With the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, the Baltic Sea will become an internal sea of ​​the alliance,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said arrogantly the other day.

And although it is customary for us to ridicule the geopolitical attempts of the Baltic dwarfs, in this situation they will be in their right and the entire collective West will support them. This way, the ball of initiative will be in their court.

Whenever Russian ships need to move from bases in the Russian part of the Gulf of Finland, they will need to seek permission from Helsinki, Stockholm and Tallinn to move in their territorial waters, and one click of NATO fingers will be enough to deny this, after which Russia will have exactly two options left: either go ahead, running into an international incident, or silently swallow the insult until better times.

Moreover, NATO has the legal opportunity to cut off ships in roadsteads near St. Petersburg from the Baltic Fleet headquarters in Kaliningrad. In the event of a real threat to Russia from NATO, this will provide the opportunity for a naval blockade of St. Petersburg. The Baltic Fleet, squeezed on all sides, will have nowhere to turn in such conditions. And this is not a joke at all, but a reality for which you need to be prepared.

_{In addition, one more nuance should be kept in mind. The neutral status of Finland and the obligation not to join military blocs hostile to the USSR and then its successor the Russian Federation were not a charitable gesture on the part of the Finns, but a direct consequence of their defeat in the Winter War of 1939-1940, when Finland ceded a significant security zone in Karelia to the USSR together with the fortifications of the “Mannerheim Line” located on these lands, moving the border from Leningrad by 70 kilometers.}

Today, by joining NATO, Finland essentially unilaterally denounced its obligations under the treaty with the USSR. And who knows - maybe politicians in Helsinki might think of trying to return the lands given to Stalin. Today it sounds like science fiction, but tomorrow, and especially the day after tomorrow, it may become reality. In any case, you need to be prepared for anything.

What should Russia do in the current circumstances? There are already voices in Moscow in favor of considering such steps by Estonia and Finland as aggression. But this is not enough. Purely speculatively, one could recall the provisions of the Peace of Nystadt in 1721, which put an end to the Northern War with the Swedes. But the problem is that three hundred years have passed since then, and geopolitical reality has changed several times.

Not only is there no Russian Empire, but the modern Russian Federation is only its cultural and historical, but not its legal successor. But even if it did, so much water has flowed under the bridge since the conclusion of the Peace of Nystad that today we can talk about it with the same success as Ukraine denouncing the results of the Pereyaslav Rada or the Kyuchuk-Kainardzhi Treaty of the times of Catherine II.

Let me remind you that after the First World War, the Russian revolution and the birth of independent Baltic limitrophes, the “Nishtad” reality became a thing of the past - Russia lost most of the ports in the Baltic and, moreover, agreed to this in exchange for international recognition of the USSR.

After World War II, Europe lived for several decades in the Yalta and Potsdam peace, the boundaries and spheres of influence in which were determined by the victors of Nazism at the relevant conferences. It was no longer Russia, but the USSR that regained the Baltic states along with its ports, but this was legitimized not by appeals to antiquity, but by newly discovered circumstances and treaties that annulled those concluded by the tsars and had nothing to do with them.

And after the signing of the well-known Final Act of the first summit of heads of state and government of the CSCE participating states in Helsinki on August 1, 1975, we managed to live for some time in the “Helsinki” reality, which enshrined the principle of the inviolability of borders in post-war Europe.

However, with the collapse of first the USSR, then Czechoslovakia, and then Yugoslavia, the “Helsinki” peace sank into oblivion. References to it today have only educational and historical significance, otherwise it will be necessary to turn the geopolitical mincemeat backwards, calling into question the legitimacy of the Russian Federation itself - after all, it emerged in the international arena as an independent state precisely as a result of the voluntary violation by the participants of the USSR of the Helsinki principles of the inviolability of borders.

_{The truth is that the USSR was dissolved not by overseas adversaries, but by the Soviet leaders themselves, and they did it voluntarily. Having recognized the independence, including that of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.}

Thus, today the Russian Federation has very limited tools for influencing the Baltic limitrophes. This is, firstly, a land transport blockade that blocks their income from transit. Secondly, there is the threat of using tactical nuclear weapons as a last resort option for self-defense. Well, a special military operation on the ground, similar to the Ukrainian one.

“They simply expect that the entire Gulf of Finland will be able to be covered by missiles from Finland and Estonia. We said at one time that Finland or Sweden joining NATO is not something extraordinary for us, if it does not pose a threat to our country,” says military expert Yuri Knutov, assessing the seriousness of the signals from the Estonian Ministry of Defense about negotiations with Finland on the creation of a common missile defense system, which will make it possible to close the Gulf of Finland to Russian warships.

Russia has something to answer to this. These are “access prohibited zones”, these are the S-400 air defense systems, and the Bastion complexes with Onyx missiles and the Iskander complexes.

When performing combat missions, Russian ships will be covered from the shore by S-350 systems, or will go under the protection of Russian frigates.

A new northern anti-Russian coalition consisting of three Baltic states, Finns, Swedes and Poles can be imagined quite easily. But here, too, you need to understand that there is no need for Russia to fight on two fronts. This means that Moscow will not be able to seriously engage with the Balts until the issue in Ukraine is closed.

_{And this is where that very dangerous time fork arises - if the West decides that it’s time, and the Baltic dwarfs get the go-ahead from their older brothers in Washington and London, they can escalate with Russia on the issue of the fleet, without waiting for the end of the Northern Military District in Ukraine. Especially if it drags on.}