Moscow has denied that it was looking to change Russia’s maritime border in the Baltic Sea as stated in a now-deleted decree published on a government website, with one former Moscow diplomat saying it may have been an administrative error.
Diplomatic tensions on the strategically sensitive waters surrounded by NATO members and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad increased after a document appeared on a Moscow government portal calling for the reassessment of maritime borders in the Gulf of Finland.
It sparked a concerned response from Lithuania, which accused Moscow of “escalatory provocations to intimidate neighboring countries.” Swedish Commander-in-Chief Micael Byden said that Vladimir Putin aims to control the Baltic Sea. Finland said it was reviewing the case and expected Moscow to act according to the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Sea.
However, unnamed military-diplomatic sources in Russia were quoted by state news agencies as saying Moscow “does not have any intentions of revising the state border line, economic zone, and continental shelf” in the region.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the Russian proposal is not politically motivated, although he added that increased level of confrontation in the Baltic region “requires appropriate steps” from Russian agencies to “ensure security.”
Antti Aimo-Koivisto/Getty Images
No explanation was given for the deletion of the document from the government portal. However, Boris Bondarev, a former adviser to the Russian mission to the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland, who resigned in protest over Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said that the incident could simply have been down to an administrative error, independent Russian news outlet Agentstvo reported.
“It seems to me that this is most likely some kind of careless handling of documents,” Bondarev said, according to the outlet. “I would not make some kind of sensation out of this.” Newsweek has contacted Bondarev and the Russian Defense Ministry for comment.
Meanwhile, the document raised other questions from commentators, with the Russian correspondent of Finnish outlet Yle, Heikki Heiskanen, writing that the drawing of borders “is not actually within the competence of the Ministry of Defense—until the borders are changed by force.”
In assessing the diplomatic response, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said on Wednesday that “Western officials noted that Russia may be reassessing the basis for maritime borders in order to revise maritime zones in the Baltic Sea.”
However, Finnish open-source intelligence analyst and military history expert Emil Kastehelmi said that, while changing maritime boundaries are not exceptional and were last made between Finland and Russia in 2017, “this time, there are good reasons to interpret Russian actions primarily as provocations.”
“Russia could have published maps and coordinates of the border changes it planned, but they let the unclear situation continue,” Kastehelmi wrote in a thread on X, formerly Twitter.
“This was not ordinary diplomatic interaction but deliberate provocation, a calculated maneuver. Perhaps Russia wanted to signal that it does not fear the West, and that NATO membership doesn’t mean a country is safe from arbitrary territorial demands,” Kastehelmi added.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
