Keir Giles
Senior Consulting Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme
Chatham House
UK
Twitter: @keirgiles
The author of Russia’s War on Everybody (available in Finnish as Venäjän sota jokaista vastaan - https://amzn.to/3aPtKxB)
For most of the Baltic Sea region, geopolitics has not "returned" – it never left. Instead, it is the rest of Europe that is now catching up to a reality that has long been plain to many states around the Baltic. Europe’s security situation today is precisely the one that Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had long warned of – and were written off as troublemakers in the EU and NATO for doing so. The invasion of Ukraine and the associated deepening confrontation between Russia and the West have done no more than confront the rest of Europe with the reality that has faced Russia's neighbours all along.
But the front-line states also continue to lead the way in how to deal with the challenge from the eastern neighbour. Long held up as a template for resilience against "hybrid threats", the total defence and comprehensive defence approaches exemplified across the region have never been more relevant for other countries looking for means to bolster their defences against Russia in both conventional military and “sub-threshold” terms. The search for resilience against whole-of-society attacks carried out by countries that had neglected their defences while disregarding the growing threat from Russia repeatedly lands on the concepts and models either under construction, or never dismantled, around the Baltic.
The Baltic Sea region states have thus found themselves inadvertently in a multifaceted leadership role. Paradoxically, it is precisely because of this that it could be argued their moment of greatest danger has already passed. The first half of the previous decade saw an already aggressive and assertive Russia eying a security vacuum in the Baltic states, with NATO determinedly unwilling to heed and address the lessons of Russia’s war on Georgia in 2008. And yet by the end of the 2010s, even before western Europe began sluggishly to awaken itself to the threat, the arrival of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) contingents in the Baltic states and Poland meant that the long-running question of NATO's commitment to their defence was resolved. In stark contrast to its neighbour Germany, Poland’s drive for restoring military capability appears to be genuine and determined. And now the accession of Finland and Sweden, another perpetually open question finally closed by Vladimir Putin, by turning the Baltic into a “NATO lake” takes off the table all of the practical questions of reaching and reinforcing the easternmost members of the alliance that provided so much food for thought for NATO planners and outside observers.
This combination of civil resilience and military mutual reliance means that states in the Baltic Sea region are also better prepared than most for managing the fallout of Russia's inevitable short-term hostility and equally inevitable long-term decline. Russia's war on Ukraine could still lead to a very wide range of possible outcomes; but none of them removes Russia as a threat to its neighbours. Even if Russia's ground forces are emasculated for the long term, and its energy weapon already wielded and parried by Europe, this represents only a fraction of the range of harmful cross-border effects that Russia has been delivering into the frontline states throughout the period of notional peacetime. And that is even before we consider the possibility of disorder in Russia, or an unplanned transition of power, leading to spillover effects on neighbours that are the result of collateral damage rather than deliberate policy. In an echo of the early 1990s, at some stage the greater concern for countries in the region could be the Kremlin's lack of control over what its instruments of power do, rather than what it consciously directs them to.
But the key difference from the 1990s is the removal of uncertainty. France and Germany now appear increasingly isolated in their pretence that the period before February 2022 was one of peace to which we can all safely return; and in much of the rest of Europe there is now no doubt of the nature of the threat, and consequently no doubt that the front-line states must be aided in their defence against it. The formation of the multinational Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) with the UK as framework nation is both a statement of intent and a practical means of assisting Russia’s neighbours when “old NATO” might be unwilling to act, and JEF planning and exercises increasingly recognise that the challenge is not solely a military one. With help, again, from Vladimir Putin, people across the continent understand as never before that defence of their homes begins where Europe meets Russia - and the example of Ukraine means that there is no longer a danger of a confrontation with Moscow being written off as a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom they know nothing.
The author of Russia’s War on Everybody (available in Finnish as Venäjän sota jokaista vastaan - https://amzn.to/3aPtKxB)
For most of the Baltic Sea region, geopolitics has not "returned" – it never left. Instead, it is the rest of Europe that is now catching up to a reality that has long been plain to many states around the Baltic. Europe’s security situation today is precisely the one that Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had long warned of – and were written off as troublemakers in the EU and NATO for doing so. The invasion of Ukraine and the associated deepening confrontation between Russia and the West have done no more than confront the rest of Europe with the reality that has faced Russia's neighbours all along.
But the front-line states also continue to lead the way in how to deal with the challenge from the eastern neighbour. Long held up as a template for resilience against "hybrid threats", the total defence and comprehensive defence approaches exemplified across the region have never been more relevant for other countries looking for means to bolster their defences against Russia in both conventional military and “sub-threshold” terms. The search for resilience against whole-of-society attacks carried out by countries that had neglected their defences while disregarding the growing threat from Russia repeatedly lands on the concepts and models either under construction, or never dismantled, around the Baltic.
The Baltic Sea region states have thus found themselves inadvertently in a multifaceted leadership role. Paradoxically, it is precisely because of this that it could be argued their moment of greatest danger has already passed. The first half of the previous decade saw an already aggressive and assertive Russia eying a security vacuum in the Baltic states, with NATO determinedly unwilling to heed and address the lessons of Russia’s war on Georgia in 2008. And yet by the end of the 2010s, even before western Europe began sluggishly to awaken itself to the threat, the arrival of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) contingents in the Baltic states and Poland meant that the long-running question of NATO's commitment to their defence was resolved. In stark contrast to its neighbour Germany, Poland’s drive for restoring military capability appears to be genuine and determined. And now the accession of Finland and Sweden, another perpetually open question finally closed by Vladimir Putin, by turning the Baltic into a “NATO lake” takes off the table all of the practical questions of reaching and reinforcing the easternmost members of the alliance that provided so much food for thought for NATO planners and outside observers.
This combination of civil resilience and military mutual reliance means that states in the Baltic Sea region are also better prepared than most for managing the fallout of Russia's inevitable short-term hostility and equally inevitable long-term decline. Russia's war on Ukraine could still lead to a very wide range of possible outcomes; but none of them removes Russia as a threat to its neighbours. Even if Russia's ground forces are emasculated for the long term, and its energy weapon already wielded and parried by Europe, this represents only a fraction of the range of harmful cross-border effects that Russia has been delivering into the frontline states throughout the period of notional peacetime. And that is even before we consider the possibility of disorder in Russia, or an unplanned transition of power, leading to spillover effects on neighbours that are the result of collateral damage rather than deliberate policy. In an echo of the early 1990s, at some stage the greater concern for countries in the region could be the Kremlin's lack of control over what its instruments of power do, rather than what it consciously directs them to.
But the key difference from the 1990s is the removal of uncertainty. France and Germany now appear increasingly isolated in their pretence that the period before February 2022 was one of peace to which we can all safely return; and in much of the rest of Europe there is now no doubt of the nature of the threat, and consequently no doubt that the front-line states must be aided in their defence against it. The formation of the multinational Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) with the UK as framework nation is both a statement of intent and a practical means of assisting Russia’s neighbours when “old NATO” might be unwilling to act, and JEF planning and exercises increasingly recognise that the challenge is not solely a military one. With help, again, from Vladimir Putin, people across the continent understand as never before that defence of their homes begins where Europe meets Russia - and the example of Ukraine means that there is no longer a danger of a confrontation with Moscow being written off as a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom they know nothing.