Gela Andrew Suli & Jaakko Henrik Laakso: Two seas, one stronger alliance

Europe needs to spend more on defence and make better use of what it spends. With Washington placing greater emphasis on the Indo-Pacific, European allies face growing pressure to take responsibility for their conventional defence. Cooperation between the Baltic and Black Sea regions offers one way to strengthen the civilian systems on which that defence depends.

The connection is already visible in threats to undersea cables, GPS interference and attacks on energy infrastructure. A power failure or a closed port affects civilian life and military operations alike. NATO’s 2025 Hague commitment recognised this dependence, setting investment targets through 2035 that include critical infrastructure and civil preparedness alongside military requirements.

Around the Baltic Sea, EU integration has supported economic cooperation and common rules. Finland’s accession to NATO in 2023 and Sweden’s in 2024 strengthened the region’s collective defence. Yet deterrence alone does not remove the pressure on civilian infrastructure. Alongside its war in Ukraine, Russia uses information operations, sabotage and cyber attacks to put pressure on other European states.

Europe’s interests also extend through the Black Sea and South Caucasus towards Central Asia, following trade routes and energy connections. Protecting these links requires cooperation across countries with different institutions and security commitments. What then can the Baltic and Black Sea regions learn from one another?

Finlands comprehensive security model provides a useful starting point. It brings businesses and civic organisations into preparedness alongside public authorities, combining legal duties in critical sectors with voluntary cooperation. In an electricity or logistics crisis, private operators need to know their responsibilities and how their plans fit together. Essential services cannot simply stop when normal commercial arrangements break down. Other countries cannot copy the the entire Finnish system, but they can examine how responsibilities are agreed before a crisis and how operators prepare to fulfil them.

Finland also has much to learn. At a NATO-supported workshop in Warsaw in January 2026, Ukrainian representatives described maintaining essential services during the war. Their experience gives Nordic and Baltic planners a basis for questioning their own assumptions about how quickly services can be restored and what happens when backup arrangements fail. A joint exercise could test a Finnish port’s continuity plan against disruptions drawn from Ukrainian wartime experience.

Such work needs people who operate the infrastructure as well as those who write the plans. Joint working groups could bring port and energy operators together with emergency planners to develop procedures for restoring services. Regular cross-border exercises should then test those procedures, including situations in which power and supply routes fail at the same time.

Professional associations could help agree common preparedness guidance. Research institutes could assess threats, while regional development agencies could help local businesses plan for supply disruptions. A port exercise should examine whether alternative cargo routes can absorb diverted traffic and whether rail connections are usable. Differences in rail gauge, limited handling capacity or uncertainty over who takes decisions can defeat an otherwise convincing plan. Exercises are useful precisely because they reveal these problems before an emergency.

In the Black Sea, Romania, Bulgaria, Türkiye and Georgia do not need identical security doctrines, or agreement on every political dispute, to cooperate on specific tasks. The mine-countermeasures group established by Bulgaria, Romania and Türkiye in 2024 provides a precedent. Partners can build on that experience and agree how to share information about threats to critical infrastructure. Participation will vary with the task; the aim should be to make cooperation possible where interests coincide.

For smaller and medium-sized states, keeping essential services running is a contribution to collective defence that they can shape directly. Closer Baltic–Black Sea cooperation would help them meet that responsibility and make Europe a more capable transatlantic partner.