The Baltic Sea and Central Europe

I enjoy doing interviews with Radosław Sikorski, because the head of Polish diplomacy (and former Defense Minister) will always pepper his cold calculations about geopolitics, Russian influence in the EU and the growing threat of war with a few disarming anecdotes. A few weeks ago, we started our conversation with a question about the situation on the Narva, the border river separating Estonia and the EU from Russia. On 24 May, Russian border guards removed Estonian buoys that marked the border line running in the riverbed. This is an obvious Russian provocation related to Moscow’s announcement two days earlier about the expansion of Russian territorial waters in the Baltic. This declaration was interpreted as announcing territorial claims against Finland and Lithuania. And this was compounded by Russian-Belarusian maneuvers to practice procedures for the use of tactical nuclear weapons, recently stockpiled by the Russians in Belarus.

Quite a lot happened for one week, although the announcement of the border change was removed from Russian government websites. “Russia’s border announcement could be a sign of weakness and panic,” Sikorski reassured me, and when I mentioned (to turn up the heat) that Russia still had intact Baltic Fleet units at its disposal, he replied: “Yes, but we are able to do to it what the Ukrainians did to the Russian Black Sea Fleet.”

And all in all, this was not just an anecdote, but a quite brutal diagnosis of the state of the Russian armed forces in this part of Europe.

In March 2013, two Russian Tu-22M strategic bombers (today the same machines regularly fire missiles at Ukrainian cities), escorted by four fighter jets, began approaching at high speed towards Gotland, a Swedish island strategically located in the middle of the Baltic Sea. The planes with red stars on their fins carried out a simulated attack on the Swedish electronic intelligence headquarters and turned back 32 km from the island’s shores. The Swedes did not respond. In 2005, they had sent a signal to the world that they wanted to promote peace and friendly cooperation in the Baltic and withdrew troops from the island. And besides, the Russian bombers arrived just in time for Good Friday, when Swedish air force personnel had been sent on a week-long holiday.

The Russians humiliatingly showed the Swedes that they were capable of decapitating their army. A year later, after annexing Crimea and tearing away part of Donbass from Ukraine, the Russians demonstrated to NATO that they considered the Baltic to be their territory. Simulated strategic bomber attacks on Stockholm were repeated. This was compounded by numerous incidents involving Russian fighter aircraft. In 2014, a Scandinavian airline SAS plane narrowly missed colliding with a Russian reconnaissance aircraft flying with its transponder switched off. Sweden learned the right lessons from the Russian provocations. The military has returned to Gotland and the strategically located island is now protected by NATO. Is Russia, in its third year of aggression against Ukraine, in a position to threaten it? I find it doubtful. At the beginning of May 2024, the commander of the Estonian Armed Forces, Gen. Martin Herem, outlined a plan for NATO to conduct a blockade of the Baltic for Russian naval and air forces, so as to prevent Russia from supporting an attack on the Baltic States from the sea in the event of a full-scale conflict.

This is not a crackpot idea. After Sweden and Finland joined the North Atlantic Alliance, the Baltic became essentially a NATO lake. The Gulf of Finland, through which ships from Kronstadt and St Petersburg would have to pass, is only 60 km wide. The Königsberg region, where the Baltiysk air base is located, is within easy reach for NATO. On top of this, the Russian Baltic Fleet is a mere shadow of the Cold War-era fleet. One Kilo-class submarine stationed in St Petersburg, a missile destroyer based in Baltiysk, two missile frigates, 18 corvettes and some missile cutters. A total of 52 ships, most of them old.

After the annexation of Crimea, Moscow’s attention was focused on the Black Sea fleet, which was hastily reinforced and modernized, with particular emphasis on vessels carrying Kalibr cruise missiles.

The Ukrainians, although virtually without warships, were able to decimate the Black Sea fleet with missiles and naval drones. Russian ships were already evacuated from Crimea last year to the port of Novorossiysk in Russia, from which they are no longer sailing out. In a Baltic dominated by the enlarged NATO, the Russian fleet would face the same fate.

NATO dominance in the Baltic after the admission of Sweden and Finland is not the Kremlin’s only strategic concern. Russia’s border with the Alliance has become 1,340 km longer. This is the length of the border with Finland, which starts in the Arctic and stretches almost to Vyborg and the coast of the Gulf of Finland. Russia does not have the military personnel necessary to secure such a large area. Marine infantry units that were stationed in the Arctic had been sent to Ukraine back in 2022 – a total of 80 per cent of the troops stationed there at the time, or 24,000 men, were sent to the front according to Western estimates two years ago. These troops were decimated, as evidenced by the wreckage of armored personnel carriers in Arctic camouflage. A similar fate befell the units from the Königsberg District, which had already been deployed in Kharkovshchyna in late spring 2022. Units of the 11^th Corps, supposed to keep Poland in check from Königsberg, were demolished in Ukraine. During the fall offensive on Kupyansk and Izium, they suffered more than 50 per cent losses. The result? The Königsberg region is defended by barely 6,000 Russian soldiers, according to NATO estimates. Ditto for the Finnish border.

But this absolutely does not mean that Russia will let go of the Baltic. In the village of Kulikovo, a dozen kilometers from Königsberg, tactical nuclear warheads are stockpiled under reinforced concrete vaults. After 2014, Russia extensively upgraded the site and, in 2018, redeployed Iskander ballistic missile launchers capable of carrying tactical nuclear warheads to the region. Warsaw, Berlin, Copenhagen and Stockholm are within their range. Although Lithuanians shrugged off the information about the deployment of Iskanders near Königsberg, saying that there had always been nuclear weapons in the region, this threat must be taken seriously. All the more so because Putin has set up another nuclear weapons depot in Belarus, and the dictator there, Aleksandr Lukashenko, has announced the adaptation of Belarusian strike aircraft to carry them.

Putin has been threatening the West with his nuclear arsenal since the first minutes of the invasion of Ukraine, and his propagandists at their TV convocations revel in visions of nuclear mushrooms over the ruins of Paris, London or Warsaw.

I asked Minister Sikorski about this. “Nuclear weapons are the last card Putin has in his hand. We should not let ourselves be intimidated with Russian threats,” he replied. And he threw in another anecdote, about how a dozen years ago, when the Polish-American agreement on the missile defense shield base in Redzikowo near Słupsk was being negotiated, he had to ask Russian generals not to threaten Poland with a nuclear attack more often than once a quarter.

But shouldn’t Russian threats to use nuclear weapons change NATO’s nuclear doctrine around the Baltic? The only Baltic state where the Americans have so far stockpiled tactical nuclear bombs is Germany. The extension of the Nuclear Sharing Program to Poland is being called for – albeit in an undiplomatic and therefore ineffective manner – by President Andrzej Duda. Sikorski did not want to comment on this particular issue. “The quieter we are about it, the better,” he said.

There is another site of concern in the Königsberg region, namely part of the military base in the town of Pionierskiy, surrounded by an additional high wall. Several sizable parabolic antennas and other equipment are located there. It is a radio-electronic warfare station designed to jam GPS signals. It is currently operating around the clock. Its successful hits include disrupting satellite navigation on a plane carrying the British Defense Minister, who was returning home from Malbork (100 km from the region’s border). It is also likely to have contributed to the crash of a US reconnaissance drone at an air base in Mirosławiec (300 km from the border). Interfering with GPS signals must be classified as a hybrid operation. And it is in this field that Russia, although lacking troops and naval power, is able to harm the countries of NATO’s extended eastern flank.

We had the foretaste of hybrid war in 2015. A large number of migrants from the Middle East unexpectedly appeared on the Finnish-Russian border.

At the time, the world looked on in horror at the Balkans, where hundreds of thousands of people were heading towards Germany. A gigantic humanitarian disaster seemed to be looming. That migrants could be used as weapons seemed inconceivable. And Russia was then testing such weapons in a place where no one expected a migrant crisis.

Russia and its puppet Alexander Lukashenko returned to this strategy in the summer of 2021. Belarus terminated the readmission agreement with Poland and then began to draw migrants from the Middle East and Africa to its territory and then send them through swamps and wilderness to Poland. In 2015, the Finns reacted calmly to the Russian provocation by professionally sealing the border. The Law and Justice government of Poland became hysterical, however, did not ask for support from NATO or the European Union, and exploited the crisis for heaping anti-immigration propaganda on the public. Despite mobilizing the army, shutting the border off and building a fence along it, thousands of people reached Germany from Belarus through Poland. The route was duly noted by people smugglers. The route through Belovezhskaya Pushcha, although in winter it can end in death due to hypothermia, is less dangerous than crossing the Mediterranean; and simpler than an expedition across several countries in the Balkans.

A hybrid operation using migrants is currently underway, except that the driving force behind it is not Minsk, but Moscow. According to Sikorski, 90 percent of migrants illegally entering Poland have Russian visas. Donald Tusk’s government intends to seal and fortify the border. Unlike its predecessors, it does not intend to act alone, but with Baltic and Scandinavian partners. Russia is sending migrants to the borders of Lithuania and Latvia, as well as Finland. Tusk wants the European Union to develop its defense policy, to finance investment in security and finally to take care of its eastern border. These proposals open up great opportunities for the Baltic states to cooperate.

They also mark a paradigm shift in Polish foreign policy. Even before the Law and Justice government (2015-2023), Warsaw made cooperation within the Visegrad Group one of its priorities. Today, due to Orbán’s Hungary slide into authoritarianism and the pending assault on the rule of law in Slovakia, this format is becoming less and less significant. Hungary is pursuing an openly pro-Russian policy, trying to sabotage both NATO enlargement to Sweden and Finland and EU aid to Ukraine. Therefore, it is the Baltic and Scandinavian states that are becoming the main partners for the Polish government, as indicated by the intensity of contacts in the region. The Czech Republic, although landlocked, should also be included.

Russia’s hybrid operation against NATO will be gathering force. In May 2024, a Russian sabotage network was dismantled in Poland. That is why it is necessary to stick together.