Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

OPINION:

A new sea of troubles brewing in the Baltic

While 14 million tons of methane gas/carbon dioxide continue gushing to the Baltic Sea’s surface, Swedish and Danish crisis teams are working around the clock investigating how the four sabotage leaks were achieved.

NATO was immediately forthright about “deliberate, reckless and irresponsible acts,” while all governments around the Baltic basin have ordered stress tests of energy infrastructures, including oil in Norway.

“The security threat has been raised to a new level, Finland’s president, Sauli Niinisto, said last week, adding, “Security factors, in general, have resurfaced, and not only because of this pipeline.”

Security-oriented thinking should be sharpened, said the nation’s leader, together with Sweden, which is about to join NATO after decades of neutrality.

“NATO’s northern bastion will be militarily stronger with the accession of Finland and Sweden,” said Marisol Maddox of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Polar Institute, “but the threat landscape is expanding.”

In quick order, the Nordic nations are reshaping their command structures, improving the area’s military mobility, closer sharing in intelligence efforts and asking citizens witnessing to report any suspicious or unusual activities.

Above the immediate concerns the sabotage of Nord Streams 1 and 2 has caused is the question of whether the continent will ever again acquire cheap Russian gas? In the currently impossible geo-political circumstances, repairing huge lengths of concrete-coated 42-inch piping on the Baltic seabed during winter is an engineering challenge (and expense) beyond reach.

Suspicion amounting to near certainty has focused on the small Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, headquarters of Moscow’s Baltic fleet, a mere 200 miles from the sabotage sites close to the Danish island of Bornholm.

Russia is the only country in the world with a fleet of special-mission submarines designed for seabed warfare. The U.S. Navy has similar capabilities but from vessels that can be deployed for other purposes. The imminent — and timely — NATO membership of Sweden and Finland has abruptly made the Baltic Sea region an explicit strategic hub and revitalized the alliance, according to defense analysts.

It is already a theater for Russian hybrid warfare, a previously tranquil environment seriously disrupted by Moscow’s headline-catching cyberattacks on Estonia in 2009. Some experts now claim the recent explosive incidents had already been war-gamed by NATO. If so, nothing was said publicly.

Russia’s blitz on Ukraine has distracted from its many covert efforts to destabilize the Baltics — in this case, with dramatic effect. If nothing else, a source commented, the Ukraine conflict has reminded us that modern warfare is about far more than bombs and tanks; hybrid aggression has many aspects, so the Baltic is on the frontline in Vladimir Putin’s war on the West.

“Russia is no longer a stakeholder in European security,” said Michael Kofman, a research scientist at the Wilson Center, setting the tone of the first conference of its kind.

With coincidental timing, a long-planned conference of Nordic decision-makers, diplomats and academics occurred in the Finnish capital over the weekend, sponsored by the think tank Helsinki Security Forum. Impossible as it is to compress three days of complex discussion into one piece, some broad threads of agreement became apparent.

First, Russia is losing the Ukraine war; second, the conflict will continue for a good while yet as neither side is prepared to talk; third, however messily the conflict ends, Russia will emerge much weaker than previously. While the Russian leader’s threats of nuclear weapons must not be shrugged away, the likelihood he would carry them out was judged as “low” by military analysts at the conference.

The political dangers for Putin are growing, the conferees said, because it’s becoming harder for him to sell any Russian battlefield action as victories.

This has sinister implications for the West because a declining Russia will make it more dependent on China. That country will use Moscow as a client state and, therefore, a future proxy for Beijing around the world.

David Haworth has covered Europe for the International Herald Tribune and other publications since the early 1970s. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.