Calls to ‘blockade’ Russia in the Baltic don’t make any sense

The Baltic has been in the news recently. New events in the Nord Stream gas pipeline sabotage saga, airliners finding their navigation equipment jammed and ‘dark fleet’ oil smuggling have all attracted attention. Russia is at the heart of all of these stories.

On Nord Stream, Lloyds of London has declared that its policies will not provide insurance cover for the ruptured Baltic pipelines because the damage was inflicted by “a government”.

Second, jamming operations affecting the GPS navigation equipment of commercial aircraft have increased recently. Originally the jamming was centred in Russia’s Baltic exclave, Kaliningrad, but this has now moved to St Petersburg. Unlike the case of Nord Stream, it’s unambiguously clear who is responsible. Where there is less consensus is whether satnav jamming is being done deliberately to interfere with civil aviation or whether it is a by-product of attempting to jam long-range Ukrainian drone attacks. My bet is on the latter. Either way, it would be interesting to get Defence Secretary Grant Shapps’s view on this after the RAF aircraft carrying him was jammed back in March.

Finally, ships smuggling Russian oil, the so-called ‘dark fleet’ – unregistered, uninsured, often unseaworthy and running through tricky navigational channels without embarking pilots, are a growing menace in the Baltic. Dark fleet vessels are also routinely bunkering (transferring oil at sea from ship to ship) in the vicinity of Gotland, threatening an environmental disaster that would comfortably rival that of Nord Stream.

These are all grey zone activities and, as has been the case for sub-threshold activities since the dawn of warfare, what to do about it is causing pain and division. That is, after all, the point.

So it was interesting to hear the commander of the Estonian Defence Forces, General Martin Herem, say recently: “Along with Poland, Sweden, and Finland, which have just joined Nato, we should be able to attain one of our key objectives, the possible blockade in the Baltic Sea.”

The president of Latvia then appeared to endorse this adding, “To answer to Russian obvious hybrid warfare and to protect our critical infrastructure, we have to say we can close the Baltic Sea to Russian ships.”

A blockade is an act of war designed to prevent the movement of supplies to enemy territory. Formally blockading the Baltic would almost certainly see whoever did it at war with Russia and in contravention of numerous laws and conventions which the Western powers are spending considerable effort upholding elsewhere in the world.

Even if someone could blockade Russia in the Baltic, why should they?

If the aim of the blockade is to cripple the Russian economy, what guarantees are there that it would work? If it is to strangle the dark fleet, that might work but only in the Baltic: Russian oil could still be shipped out via the Black Sea, the Arctic and the Pacific, as well as by pipeline.

If we’re generous and say the Baltic states really meant ‘restrict Freedom of Navigation’ rather than ‘blockade’, whilst that isn’t an act of war, it is still illegal.

The criteria for stopping ships and boarding them on the high seas are defined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and smuggling isn’t on the list. Piracy is, but smuggling isn’t. So if you want to stop and board suspected dark fleet ships on the high seas (outside a country’s 12 nautical mile limit), you need a UN Security Council resolution, which you won’t get.

Of course, ships travelling from St Petersburg or Kaliningrad to the world’s oceans cannot remain in international waters. They have to pass through the Danish Straits, narrow enough that such ships will find themselves in Danish, Swedish or German waters at some point.

But it’s still not legally simple to stop and board them there, not even for the countries concerned. Ships have a right of ‘innocent’ or ‘transit passage’ through territorial waters as if they were still on the high seas. A nation can suspend innocent passage but has to have security concerns to do so. The dark fleet is an economic and environmental menace but technically even the ones with extra aerials fitted don’t pose a direct security risk. Worse still, under the Copenhagen Convention of 1857, reaffirmed by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, the Danish Straits are international waterways.

And even worse still there is hypocrisy. Western warships frequently insist on the principle of Freedom of Navigation in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and lately the southern Red Sea. Fighting to preserve that principle while simultaneously violating it in the Baltic would not be a good look.

So blockading isn’t legal, isn’t practical, wouldn’t stop the jamming, would only restrict the dark fleet in the Baltic, would undermine our position elsewhere in the world and would lead us to war. And besides, who is providing the warships to do it?

We are therefore in the grey-zone trap specifically designed to restrict counter actions and/or tease out an illegal response. For now, diplomatic efforts (the Russian Defence Attache in London is being expelled for spying) clear analysis and intelligence sharing and legal military responses where appropriate is all we have.

There may come a time when we need to move into our own grey zone but given that we are not doing that against a militia in Yemen, it seems unlikely that we will do it against Russia any time soon. Legitimacy also remains key – it’s worth remembering what happened to the last UK leader who bent the rules to join someone else’s fight. The British Foreign Secretary says that the world must be “tougher and more assertive” in the face of Russian (and Chinese) aggression, but what does this mean in terms of the rule book, and once you have answered that, whose military resources does he propose to use?

Nato’s Article V, the principle of ‘one in, all in’ remains the bedrock of our defensive strength. A key part of this is unified messaging and one thing is for sure, countries threatening illegal, impractical and unrealistic actions do nothing to solidify this strength.

Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer