The incident illustrates how far apart Russia and the Baltic Sea NATO countries are, writes Russia correspondent Heikki Heiskanen.
Heikki HeiskanenRussia correspondent
MOSCOW The Russian Ministry of Defense’s intentions to change the maritime borders of the Gulf of Finland suddenly became public on Tuesday evening, when the Russian media posted a draft on the government’s document portal, in which the project was presented.
Such plans came as a surprise to the governments of Finland and Lithuania.
In the document, the Ministry of Defense justified the change of sea borders as a declarative action: The guidelines of 1985 no longer correspond to the current geographical conditions.
According to the text, the purpose of the ministry is to change the list of geographical points according to which the boundaries of territorial waters are measured.
It was still difficult to conclude from the document itselfwhere exactly the border lines would be moved and how Russia’s intentions relate to the maritime borders of Finland and Lithuania.
in the Russian media and Ilta-Sanom a list of these points is cited. On Wednesday, such an attachment was no longer visible on the portal’s pages.
in the Kremlin comment representative of the president Dmitry Peskov. He urged to ask the ministry for details and said that the presentation has no political background.
At noon “military-diplomatic source” refused to deny to the Russian news agencies For the cup, for RIA Novosti and For Interfaxthat Russia intends to change its borders.
– There has not been and is no intention to re-examine the territorial waters of the Baltic Sea, the economic zones, the width of the coastal continental shelf or the alignment of the Russian state border, the source said.
Next, the entire presentation disappeared from the government portal. The search only shows the text: The project has been deleted.
It seems that the ministry’s proposal has been withdrawn. Of course, you can’t be sure.
What remains is confusion. One can always speculate that someone in the Russian bureaucracy wanted to send a message about how difficult things could get in the Baltic Sea in the future.
Russia is known not to be warmed by the idea of the Baltic Sea as NATO’s inland sea.
It is also possible that there has been an internal conflict in the Russian administration.
Perhaps the Ministry of Defense was overzealous and stepped on another authority’s property and toes with its presentation.
Border alignments do not actually fall under the Ministry of Defense’s purview – until the borders are changed by force.
This is how the Finnish Foreign Minister commented on the matter:
Of course, the situation tells about thathow completely broken the voice connections to Russia are at the moment.
If it was an innocent coordinate check, the Russian authorities could of course have informed the neighboring countries in advance.
Russia has been irritated by recent talks about tankers transporting Russian oil checking and stopping in the Danish straits.
EU countries are concerned about the shadow fleet of tankers, with which Russia has tried to circumvent the oil price ceiling. Russia has already warned Denmark against starting inspections.
If the idea of the border review proposal was to send some kind of warning to NATO countries, at least Russia’s communication did not moderate the mood.
Rather, there were demands to respond to Russia as hard as possible, for example by canceling the demilitarization of Åland.