Reflecting on One Year of War: Standoff and Cooperation in the Baltic Sea​

By Elisabeth Braw

It was a sign of true desperation when, the day after the United States had announced that the People’s Liberation Army maintains a “balloon program,” China’s foreign ministry spokesman tried to deflect attention by mentioning Nord Stream. We can, however, focus on China’s balloon program and Nord Stream at the same time. Indeed, we should give the Baltic Sea far more attention as a naval location, a shipping location and a body of water whose health needs urgent assistance.

“We wonder why there is little coverage by some media hailed as free, professional and impartial on the latest investigative report on the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines and the chemical leak caused by the train derailment in the U.S.,” Wang Wenbin, China’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, complained to international journalists at a news conference on February 14. Weng was referring to Seymour Hersch’s single-source Substack story about the Nord Stream explosions, in which he claims that the explosions were the work of the U.S. Navy.

It was no surprise that Weng might want to deflect attention from China’s “balloon program.” However this program is constituted, it clearly contains at least one balloon and this balloon has now been detected and downed by the U.S. military. But Nord Stream deserves attention independently of any Chinese activities. Indeed, the whole Baltic Sea deserves attention. The tiny ocean, which connects Russia, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, is an exceptionally busy body of water for shipping. In 2019, the last normal year before Covid-19 and the Ukraine War, nearly 30,000 civilian vessels traveled on the Baltic Sea, nearly 8,000 of them commercial ones. Nearly 4,000 cargo ships and almost 2,000 tankers participated in this busy traffic; indeed, shipping supplies Baltic Sea countries with daily necessities in a quantity that would be almost impossible to achieve through rail and air traffic alone. Indeed, shipping has been the region’s identity ever since the time of the Hanseatic League.

But then and now, the tankers and cargo ships, and indeed the passenger ferries, co-exist with the surrounding countries’ navies, and now the world’s growing geopolitical tension is causing these navies to grow. The Baltic Sea’s navies were large during the Cold War, too, and they were active. In one of the Cold War’s most famous incidents, the Soviet Union’s U137 nuclear submarine – having participated in Zapad 1981, collected supplies in East Germany and conducted observations of shipping traffic around the island of Bornholm – sailed towards the coast of southern Sweden. It was just off a naval installation, in waters reserved for the Swedish military, when it ran aground, causing acute embarrassment to Moscow and tense days when Sweden had to decide what to do about the intruder from the mighty country. Estonia’s most recent chief of defense, General Riho Terras, spent three years as a conscript in another part of the Soviet Navy.

But during the Cold War, Baltic Sea shipping was a fraction of its current size: there was simply very little trade between the ocean’s Western European side and its Warsaw Pact one. Today shipping remains voluminous despite sanctions on Russia, since Kaliningrad only accounted for a small amount of Russia shipping to begin with. And it has to co-exist with the growing navies as well as another post-Cold War addition: undersea cables. Sweden’s Navy Chief, Rear Admiral Ewa Skoog Haslum, has highlighted the risk of grayzone aggression in this busy maritime environment – and she was proven right when someone sabotaged Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 this September. The busyness, of course, also increases the risk of accidental encounters between navy vessels and commercial ones.

When the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged, they released the largest methane emission ever recorded, and while in 2019 the ocean’s shipping alone released 14 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide and related emissions. Underneath the surface, too, the beautiful ocean is in sorry shape. Until a few years ago, its health was even worse. Kaliningrad was a repeat offender, spewing its sewage untreated into the ocean. Six years ago, it inaugurated a wastewater treatment plant, paid for primarily with loans from European institutions and grants from Russia’s Nordic neighbors.

For the sake of maritime health, this shining example of Baltic Sea cooperation has to keep going even as Russia and its Baltic Sea neighbors square off over Ukraine and even as the Baltic Sea’s other countries arm themselves in defense against Russia. Indeed, on matters of marine health, the neighbors should collaborate even more. That’s the extraordinarily complex situation in which the Baltic Sea now finds itself: extremely busy commercial waters; a stage for geopolitical stand-offs and worse; and an environmental patient whose health needs to be nurtured and improved. We indisputably need to look to the Baltic Sea, but not for the reasons Weng proposed.

 

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she focuses on defense against grayzone threats. She is also a columnist with Foreign Policy and Politico Europe, and the author of The Defender’s Dilemma: Identifying and Deterring Gray-Zone Aggression (2022) and God’s Spies (about the Stasi; 2019).

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The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.