The sooner the better, I reckon.
Last week, Jim Geraghty described how Russia was upping the pressure in the eastern Baltic, “removing Estonia’s border-marker buoys from the Narva River.” It’s worth adding that it’s not a particularly wide river at that point. You can look across it and see the cars driving along the road on the Russian side and so on.
With perfect symbolism, the western side of the river is watched over by the Hermann Castle, built by the Danes and then reinforced by the Teutonic knights (history in this part of the world is complicated). The castle is the symbol of the city of Narva, a once beautiful city, which, after its almost total destruction during the Second World War, was rebuilt Soviet-style and repopulated with an ethnic Russian population. To say that Narva is a sensitive spot is an understatement.
Across the river, directly opposite Hermann Castle is Russia’s Ivangorod fortress, built as a bulwark against the Teutonic knights by Ivan III (“The Great”), whose project was the “gathering” of the scattered Russian lands. He is long said to have been a hero of Putin’s. For a good picture of the two castles, go here. As you can see, they are practically cheek-by-jowl.
As Jim noted, Moscow also suggested that it was going to extend its maritime borders in the Baltic at the expense of Finland and Lithuania. The project appears to have been abandoned, but who really knows? Jim suggests that this could be an example of Russian “salami tactics,” taking “territory, slice by slice — with each small step seeming too inconsequential to spur a full-scale NATO response. By the time the West realizes that it’s been conceding territory, inch by inch, it will be too late, and the Russians will have already gained a significant advantage.” This is what has been happening on the border between the Russian puppet state of South Ossetia (formerly a part of Georgia) and Georgia, where Russia has been nibbling away at the demarcation line for years.
Farmers along the boundary have gone to bed one night thinking their fields and orchards were in Georgia, only to wake up and discover fencing and trenches indicating otherwise. New green signs announcing the presence of a South Ossetian “state border” occasionally pop up in places previously understood to be well within Georgian territory.
I’m not convinced that this is what is happening in the Baltic. To me, it’s more in keeping with another Russian tactic, explained to me by an Estonian defense official years ago. The way that Russia works, he said, was to poke and prod and see what happens. Russian jamming of GPS systems in the Baltic is (most likely) another example of the same (with some “just in case” testing thrown in).
But who knows?
Jim also wrote that recently there have been “enough incidents — arrests of suspected [Russian] spies and saboteurs, mysterious fires, etc. — added up to spur NATO to issue a collective statement warning Russia to knock off the “malign activities.”
Warnings are right and proper, but as Jim asked in a recent Corner post in response to something I had written about the GPS jamming, how will the U.S. respond to this sort of thing? His guess, “nothing.” Dealing with harassment or sabotage that falls into the “gray zone” short of war is very difficult, as the Russians know. Nevertheless, as Jim wrote, the U.S. has the capability to fire off, say, a few cyberwarning shots of its own, which may be wise if an increasingly dangerous escalation of “incidents” is to be avoided.
Meanwhile, via ERR News (the English-language service of Estonian Public Broadcasting):
On Friday, the interior ministers of the three Baltic states, as well as Poland, Finland, and Norway, discussed the creation of a so-called drone wall on their borders with Russia. Estonian Interior Minister Lauri Läänemets (SDE) said Estonia would like to cover its entire eastern border with technology capable of detecting and repelling drones. Major cities would also need to install this capability.
The sooner the better, I reckon.