Last week NATO announced that it is increasing its presence in the Baltic Sea. The pretext is damage in recent months to undersea cables allegedly caused by ships associated with Russia’s “shadow fleet.”
Anonymous intelligence officials admit to Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post that there’s really nothing nefarious about the incidents; they were just accidents. Nevertheless the West is using it as an opportunity to check off three boxes: push ahead with more military encirclement of Russia, harass Russia’s oil trade, and gaslight the public in order to sell increased defense budgets with the corresponding social spending cuts.
The new NATO operation purportedly in response to the damaged cables involves more ships, surveillance planes, drones in the air and underwater, and other types of intelligence gathering. The U.K. — that AI superpower in the North Sea — is leading the charge on an AI-based system to track suspicious ships in the Baltic. The Commander Task Force Baltic Command Center in Germany’s Baltic port city of Rostock will take a lead role in oversight. The operation is called “Baltic Sentry.”
“If the Russians see that we are present there, the likelihood of such sabotage acts immediately decreases, because saboteurs can be caught in the act, and once caught, it’s much easier to deal with them,” Arjen Warnaar, commander of NATO’s Standing Naval Maritime Group 1, told the Estonian ERR news outlet.
The reason for NATO’s beefed up presence is predicated on a lie, however — at least according to some anonymous Western intelligence officials.
The Washington Post cited several from the US and Europe in a Sunday report highlighting that damage in recent months to underwater power and communications cables in the Baltic was more likely than not the result of simple maritime accidents rather than nefarious actions from Moscow. That would hardly be surprising. According to Telegeography, cables and other underwater infrastructure suffer minor damage all the time:
Submarine cables break all the time. On average, two to four break somewhere in the world every week. While damage is more common in some areas than others, these breaks—or “faults”—eventually happen to almost every cable…
Most come from fishing equipment, normal anchoring activity, and natural disasters like undersea earthquakes. Internal component or equipment failure causes another, smaller category of faults.
And in none of these cases are we talking about the sophisticated level of destruction like in the case of the Nord Stream pipelines. These are all relatively benign incidents that caused little disruption, were quickly repaired, and likely would have gone mostly unnoticed in absence of NATO hullabaloo and media attention.
Instead Western officials have seized on the cable damage to make escalatory statements and float the idea of closing the “NATO lake” to Russian ships. Some of the NATO Keystone Cops in the Baltics and elsewhere probably are crazy enough to try some funny business to effectively shut down a few of Russia’s busiest ports on the Baltic (which might help explain Bezos’ WaPo piece throwing cold water on the allegations of Russian sabotage).
Upon the announcement that Finland and Sweden would join NATO, former Secretary General of the military bloc Anders Fogh Rasmussen proclaimed it was a strategic victory because “If we wish, we can block all entry and exit to Russia through St. Petersburg.”
Estonia, which has a population smaller than Russia’s armed forces, has in the past made noise about causing problems in the Gulf of Finland with Estonian Minister of Defense Hanno Pevkur talking about how the integration of Estonian and Finnish coastal missile defense the two sides are working on will allow them to close the Gulf of Finland to Russian ships. That would effectively blockade Saint Petersburg, which Russia would consider an act of war. How would that integrated missile defense system handle Russian hypersonic missiles?
Roughly 60 percent of Russia’s total seaborne oil exports pass through the Danish straits on its way to international markets, and Moscow’s updated version of the Naval Doctrine of the Russian Federation lists the Baltic Sea and and the Danish Straits as “important areas,” in which the use of force will be available as a last resort after the other options have been exhausted.
It’s more likely that this is just another point in the tails-we-win, heads-you-lose game the West thinks it’s playing. On the one hand, ramping up the militarization of the Baltic — as well as everywhere else — is in line with the overall NATO racket. On the other hand, who knows, maybe this attempt to cause another headache for Moscow will, according to the wishful thinking in the West, finally lead to the implosion of the Putin government.
Despite the Washington Post report revealing that “intercepted communications and other classified intelligence” collected by NATO countries indicate that crews and poorly maintained ships were behind the accidents, I have yet to see NATO recalling its “Baltic Sentry. That’s hardly surprising because stopping damage to cables isn’t really the point.
The Financial Times noted as much after a similar incident in the Fall of 2023 when some NATO states were making noise about UN Convention on the Law of the Sea laws permitting states to to “institute proceedings, including detention of the vessel” given “clear objective evidence” that the vessel poses a threat of environmental damage.:
But officials briefed on the proposal say it relies on the capacity of Denmark’s naval authorities to stop and check the tankers, and raises the question of what Copenhagen would do if a ship refused to stop.
“Discussions appear to be centred on making life more complicated for Russia and the buyers of its oil,” said Henning Gloystein at Eurasia Group. “If you can make the bureaucracy and risk associated with trading Russian oil a lot more onerous the expectation is buyers will start to demand larger discounts again for their trouble.”
There you have it. It’s really about going after the ominously-named ghost ships or shadow fleet. NATO, at enormous cost to itself, will try to cause problems for ships transporting Russian oil, which might mean Moscow takes a small hit on revenue.
As Alexander Mercouris explains, the so-called “shadow fleet” are simply ships without Western insurance — freighters that are expanding the sale of oil and natural gas to much of the world in spite of Western sanctions and while eluding the insane $60-per-barrel price cap imposed by the West. As even the Associated Press admits:
The shadow fleet in fact isn’t all that shadowy. The ships don’t hide their stops at Russian oil terminals. Some have direct connections to Russia, as with the vessels owned by Sovcomflot. In other cases, it’s often unclear who exactly is behind the listed owners, and what kind of safety practices and insurance the vessels have. What sets them apart is that they transport Russian oil and operate outside the jurisdictions of the sanctioning G7 countries.
The intensifying effort to harass these ships, which are often registered to offshore firms, goes hand in hand with the recent sanctions on 183 shadow fleet vessels — an “unprecedented number.”
It’s a sign of increasing frustration as nothing has worked so far in choking off Russia’s oil sales. As Reuters reported last week, Russia’s oil exports fell in 2024, but revenue climbed by $3.8 billion.
By further militarizing the Baltic, however, NATO creates more opportunity for misunderstandings or mishaps that could dramatically escalate the conflict with Russia. Case in point:
French Navy Atlantique 2 maritime patrol aircraft has been reported to have been illuminated by the targeting radar of a RussianS-400 long range surface to air missile system on the night of January 15-16, at a time when the aircraft was flying over the Baltic Sea. The system is thought to have been located in Russia’s westernmost territory of Kaliningrad, where modern air defence systems are heavily concentrated to provide security against NATO forces that encircle it from all directions. The Atlantique 2 was reportedly conducting inspections near Swedish and Baltic waters at the time, and scanning around 200 ships. The aircraft carry heavy surveillance equipment, and can deploy both cruise missiles and torpedoes, providing them with a comparable role to the Russian Tu-142 or the American P-8. The S-400’s engagement of the French aircraft was condemned by French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu, and occurred at a time of particularly high tensions between Moscow and Paris primarily over the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian War.
The Narrative Build Up
The most recent much ballyhooed damage was to the Estlink 2 undersea power cable and four undersea communications cables between Finland and Estonia by the Eagle S, a 750-foot-long, Cook Island-flagged tanker carrying Russian oil. It isn’t the first in the Baltic to receive outsize attention. We’ve had a solid couple years now of horror stories over renegade ships and activities in the Baltic — not including the US destruction of Nord Stream of course.No, here we’re talking about nefarious actors like Russia and China. Just a few other recent examples:
- In October of 2023 The NewNew Polar Bear, a Chinese vessel damaged — intentionally, the West alleged — the Finnish-Estonian Balticconnector gas pipeline. To add insult to injury in the West, the NewNew was the first Chinese-owned containership to use Russia’s Northern Sea Route to reach the Russian port in Kaliningrad after a six-week passage.
- Telecom cables linking Finland, Estonia and Sweden were damaged allegedly inflicted by the Yi Peng 3 bulk carrier in November.
These were all relatively minor incidents that along with a few others received quite a bit of attention, and almost all stories didn’t question the allegations of some Russia-China plot to destroy Western infrastructure. Yet, the Washington Post now reports that the Estlink 2 incident, as well as those involving the NewNew Polar Bear and Yi Peng 3, have “clear explanations,” suggesting the damage was accidental.
Nonetheless, by using these incidents as an excuse NATO is well on its way to implementing the Center for Strategic and International Studies 2022 plan for NATO near-term actions in the Baltic:
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Bring Sweden and Finland into NATO. The ratification of these two nations needs to move forward without delay. Elevating them from strong partners to alliance members changes the calculus of a Baltic conflict significantly. The alliance can immediately leverage these two nations to increase strategic depth.
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Forward stage capabilities. Mines, anti-submarine capabilities, missile defense, and secure supply and logistics infrastructure should be forward staged across all domains, increasing deterrence.
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Increase patrol. A whole-of-government approach from each Baltic nation and its allies is needed to ensure that energy, communications, and sea routes remain secure. This includes Baltic Air Policing, readiness to shift the balance of A2/AD, and the monitoring and protection of maritime infrastructure.
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Strengthen command and control. Existing multi-domain command and control should be tested and ready for use. The need for effective command and control will be swift and will require resilient disaggregated nodes, though an eye should also be kept on future capability.
Baltic Sentry is a small part of the plan to encircle and pressure Russia. Perhaps more importantly it’s another piece of the ongoing dramatic overhaul of European society.
It’s another spot the fear mongers can point to and say more money must be spent on defense, and it comes as Trump and company all push for more military hardware purchases at the expense of all other social programs, which are being starved and privatized.
That restructuring and plundering of the social commons is probably a more accurate description of what “Baltic Sentry” is guarding.
