The Kremlin has said that Russia must take steps to ensure its security over “confrontation in the Baltic” amid alarm and uncertainty over Moscow’s plans to change its maritime border with Lithuania and Finland.
In a summary of his press briefing on Wednesday, Tass reported that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about state borders in the Baltic.
“The level of confrontation in the Baltic region requires Russia to take steps to ensure its security,” Peskov said, according to state-run news agency Tass. “The situation in the world requires in-depth dialogue to find ways out of tension, but the collective West rejects it.”
The recent accession of Sweden and Finland to the NATO alliance spurred by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine inspired the term “NATO lake” for the Baltic Sea, which is totally surrounded by alliance members, with the exception of Russia.
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The waters are a focal point of regional tensions that have included GPS jamming blamed on Russia, an immigration crisis that Finland said was provoked by Moscow and warnings by international leaders that Vladimir Putin might attack a NATO member.
There has been outcry over a draft decree on a Russian government website proposing the adjustment of the border around Russian islands in the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland and around the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
The Lithuanian foreign ministry called it “a deliberate, targeted, escalatory provocation to intimidate neighboring countries.”
The draft decree was published online Tuesday but by Wednesday it was no longer available, although an archived version of it can still be seen.
An unnamed Russian diplomatic-military source told Tass that Moscow “has no intentions to revise the width of territorial waters, the economic zone, the continental shelf off the mainland coast and the state border line of the Russian Federation in the Baltic.”
The draft decree states that previous geographic coordinates were registered relying on small-scale marine navigation maps based on 20th-century research which do not reflect the region’s actual maritime borders.
When asked for comment, the Finnish foreign ministry told Newsweek it was “looking into the matter” and that the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea included provisions for determining maritime zone of coastal states.
“The Russian Federation is a party to the U.N. convention and it is clear that every party to this convention acts in accordance with it,” the statement added.
Charly Salonius-Pasternak, a researcher at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs (FIIA) told Newsweek that if Russia were seeking to change maritime borders, NATO and the EU, would need to be included in any response.
“NATO as a collective defense alliance should obviously be involved,” he said. “It would only make sense for Finland to internationalize this and not try to treat it as a bilateral diplomatic thing.
“It would be a mistake to underplay this because the audience is not just Russia or the Finnish population, the audience will be allies who will be looking at how Finland responds to this—not just rhetorically but in action also.”
In a statement to Newsweek, the Lithuanian foreign ministry said that Moscow’s draft decree was further proof that “Russia’s aggressive and revisionist policy is a threat to the security of neighboring countries and Europe.”
Newsweek has contacted NATO and the Russian foreign ministry for comment.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
