Russia has stepped up its hybrid warfare tactics in the Baltic Sea and NATO countries in the region should prepare for an extended conflict with Moscow, experts said, after cables were severed and navigation systems scrambled.
Berlin this week said that a Russian cargo ship recently fired signal flares at a German military helicopter, another sign of the mounting tensions in the Baltic Sea where all of the bordering countries except Russia are now NATO members.
There is an “increase of Russian navy and civilian vessels in the Baltic Sea, this presence is increasing significantly,” German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said on Thursday.
Photo: Reuters
“What the Russian navy is trying to do is send a signal, saying: ‘We are here,’” he added.
Russian political analyst Konstantin Kalachev said that “Russia does not at all like the point of view that would have the Baltic Sea be a NATO ‘lake.’”
“The Baltic is in a kind of ‘gray zone’ between war and peace where NATO countries have to be ready for harassment of any kind,” said Nils Wang, a former Danish navy commander.
Concerns were reignited last month after two underwater telecommunications cables were severed in Swedish territorial waters of the Baltic Sea.
Sweden has launched a police investigation into suspected sabotage, and has expressed interest in a Chinese vessel, the Yi Peng 3, which sailed over the area when the cables were cut, ship tracking Web site data showed.
The cargo ship has been anchored in international waters between Sweden and Denmark for almost three weeks, guarded alternately by Swedish, German and Danish navy and coast guard vessels
The fact that the Yi Peng 3 is captained by a Russian national and left the Russian port of Ust-Luga on Nov. 15 has raised eyebrows.
The ship had operated only in Chinese waters for years until March, when it began transiting Russian ports and carrying Russian cargo.
“Physical sabotage is becoming more and more likely because it is simply easy for the aggressor to do it,” said Moritz Brake, senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Security at the University of Bonn.
“It has a big effect, not only by sending a signal, but by actually physically breaking things,” he said.
In October last year, a gas pipeline and an underwater cable linking Finland, Sweden and Estonia were also damaged. Another Chinese cargo vessel is believed to have caused that incident, Finnish police said.
The string of incidents since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine shows that “there is indeed an escalation” in the Baltic Sea, said Wojciech Lorenz, international security expert at the Polish Institute of International Affairs.
However, “it’s one piece of a bigger puzzle, where Russia is in the process of intensifying” its actions... to destabilize other countries, he said.
Finland recently said it had noticed disturbances to the Global Navigation Satellite System in the Baltic, with its coast guard alerting some ships they were sailing off course.
NATO has beefed up its naval presence in the region and is seeking to develop its surveillance capabilities, but monitoring everything that happens on the seabed is near impossible.
For countries bordering the Baltic Sea, the first step is to “show transparently to the outside world: this is what is happening here right now,” Brake said. “That is the first step towards credible deterrence.”
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