Russia stepping up hybrid warfare in Baltic Sea: Experts

STOCKHOLM - Russia has stepped up its hybrid warfare tactics in the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) countries in the region should prepare for an extended conflict with Moscow, experts said, after cables were severed and navigation systems scrambled.

Berlin said this week that a Russian cargo ship recently fired signal flares at a German military helicopter, another sign of the mounting tensions in the Baltic Sea where all of the bordering countries except Russia are now Nato members.

There is currently an “increase of Russian navy and civilian vessels in the Baltic Sea, this presence is increasing significantly” German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Dec 5.

“What the Russian navy is trying to do is send a signal, saying: ‘We are here’,” he added.

Russian political analyst Konstantin Kalachev said meanwhile that “Russia does not at all like the point of view that would have the Baltic Sea be a Nato ‘lake’,” he said.

Tensions in the region have escalated since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with European countries regularly expressing concern over “hybrid attacks” blamed on Russia.

“The Baltic is in a kind of grey zone between war and peace where Nato countries have to be ready for harassment of any kind,” former Danish navy commander Nils Wang, told AFP.

Russia wants to show “that it can basically still make it troublesome for Nato to operate in the Baltic”, he said.

Concerns were reignited last month after two underwater telecommunications cables were severed in Swedish territorial waters of the Baltic Sea in mid-November.

Sweden has launched a police investigation into suspected sabotage, and has expressed interest in a Chinese vessel, the Yi Peng 3, which sailed over the area around the time the cables were cut, according to ship tracking sites.

The cargo ship has been anchored in international waters between Sweden and Denmark for almost three weeks, guarded alternately by Swedish, German and Danish navy and coast guard vessels.

The fact that the Yi Peng 3 is captained by a Russian national and left the Russian port of Ust-Luga, west of Saint Petersburg, on Nov 15 has raised eyebrows.

In addition, the ship had operated only in Chinese waters for years until March 2024, when it began transiting Russian ports and carrying Russian cargo.

China is a close political and economic ally of Russia, whose war in Ukraine Beijing has never condemned.

Russia has denied any involvement in the cut cables, as has China, which has pledged to cooperate with the Swedish inquiry.

“Physical sabotage is becoming more and more likely because it is simply easy for the aggressor to do it,” said Dr Moritz Brake, expert at the Centre for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies at the University of Bonn.

“It has a big effect, not only by sending a signal, but by actually physically breaking things,” he said.

In October 2023, a gas pipeline and an underwater cable linking Finland, Sweden and Estonia were also damaged. Another Chinese cargo vessel is believed to have caused that incident, according to Finnish police.

The string of incidents since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine shows that “there is indeed an escalation” in the Baltic Sea, said Mr Wojciech Lorenz, international security expert at the Polish Institute of International Affairs, or Pism.

However, “it’s one piece of a (bigger) puzzle, where Russia is in the process of intensifying” its actions, whether in Ukraine with threats of nuclear war or hybrid operations and attempts to destabilise other countries, he said.

Finland recently said it had noticed disturbances to the Global Navigation Satellite System in the Baltic, with its coast guard alerting some ships they were sailing off course.

“Disturbances of navigation systems and disruption of communication cables are illustrators of a new Cold War in a digitalised world,” Rear-Admiral Wang said.

Nato has beefed up its naval presence in the region and is seeking to develop its surveillance capabilities, but monitoring everything that happens on the seabed is near impossible.

Additionally, Western countries have a lot of critical infrastructure to keep an eye on.

For countries bordering the Baltic Sea, the first step is to “show transparently to the outside world: this is what is happening here right now”, said Dr Brake.

“That is the first step towards credible deterrence.”

“We may live for many years, even decades, in a situation of hybrid conflict like this, and therefore we have to find an effective response,” said Mr Lorenz of Pism.

He said the creation of a maritime police mission, as recently proposed by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, could be such a step. AFP