Northern exposure A journal published by Russia’s Foreign Ministry prints an article warning that the Baltic Sea could become a military theater
The Russian Foreign Ministry journal “International Affairs” recently published an article urging Moscow to view the Baltic Sea as a “potential theater of military operations.” Journalists at Agentstvo drew attention to the text on Tuesday, August 19. The monthly journal, whose editorial board is overseen by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, features essays on international politics, diplomacy, and global security. Meduza summarizes the boldest claims of the controversial text on the looming “Baltic danger.”
In the text, The Baltics: Guarantees of Danger, Nikolai Mezhevich claims that Russia’s “adversaries” among the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and Northern Europe (particularly Finland) are forming a so-called “gray zone” in the Baltic Sea. Mezhevich, a chief research fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Europe, writes regularly about the foreign policies of the Baltic countries and NATO’s military activities in the region. He has been publishing in International Affairs since 2016 and often appears in the Russian media with warnings about alleged plots by Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania against Minsk, Moscow, and ethnic Russians.
Mezhevich’s concern about Russian security in the Baltic Sea follows the recent accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, which more than doubled the alliance’s land border with Russia to 2,550 kilometers (roughly 1,585 miles). He describes the emerging threat in the Baltics as an asymmetric conflict, warning that active military operations would pose great risks to major cities. “This is a space of heightened danger not only for direct military operations but also for proxy conflicts,” he argues. Mezhevich also cites the potential for “propaganda, active intelligence transitioning to terror, psychological operations, and the use of civilian objects for military purposes.”
He characterizes Russia’s ability to “break through” to the North Sea as seriously compromised:
Somewhere in the archives are dusty old plans for how the Soviet Baltic Fleet might be deployed, alongside the East German and Polish navies, back when Finland and Sweden were officially neutral. But even then, the mood was far from confident. In today’s situation, access to the North Sea itself would be of little use.
Mezhevich states that “the situation in the Baltic countries, Germany, Poland, and Northern European countries has become irreversible.” He warns that “only parties that support aggression against Russia” will “come to power” in these countries. He says the region is now cooperating strategically with Britain to create “military, political, and economic threats to Russia and Belarus.” However, Mezhevich maintains that Russia’s European adversaries won’t succeed where they have twice before: “[Their] logic is clear: it worked once, it will work again, but the conditions of the logical pair are not met. Russia in 1919, as well as in 1991, has different parameters from Russia in 2025.”
Mezhevich says Sweden’s entry into NATO could precipitate the “remilitarization” of Gotland (Sweden’s largest island, located in the middle of the Baltic Sea), but he argues that such plans “strangely” ignore the lessons Russia drew at Snake Island in the Black Sea.
Reported plans by Finland, Estonia, and Latvia to mine Russia’s borders also arouse Mezhevich’s concerns, though he simultaneously dismisses the concept as unrealistic. “No one really knows how to mine bare granite, swamps, or lakes,” he writes, adding that the installation of dense minefields and a border “fence” against Russia would be too costly. Senior economic officials in Estonia and Finland “know this perfectly well,” Mezhevich adds.
He nevertheless concludes the article with a warning that “geographic location and a complex of historical narratives” force Russia and its adversaries alike to consider the eastern part of the Baltic Sea as a “potential theater of military operations, possibly in classic, possibly in ‘gray’ formats.”