‘NATO Lake’ Vital in Long-Term Russia Conflict: Estonia FM

0
49

Russia is facing a difficult military situation in northern Europe thanks to NATO’s encirclement of the Baltic Sea, Estonia’s foreign minister has told Newsweek, with the strategic region now effectively a “NATO lake.”

Speaking with Newsweek on the sidelines of the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn, Estonia, on Saturday, Margus Tsahkna—the leader of the liberal Estonia 200 party and a coalition partner of Prime Minister Kaja Kallas—said the accession of Finland to NATO, plus the imminent addition of Sweden to the alliance, is “tremendously important.”

The situation in northern Europe “has changed,” Tsahkna said, to one more challenging for a Kremlin that now considers itself at war with the “collective West.”

“It is very politically important that you have neighboring countries as big as Finland and Sweden, and powerful as they are, in the same alliance,” said Tsahkna, who previously served as Estonia’s defense minister in 2016-17. The “practical” military capabilities that both nations will bring to the alliance are also key, the foreign minister added.

An MV-22 Osprey assault support aircraft takes off from the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge on June 7, 2022, during the BALTOPS 22 exercise in the Baltic Sea. Estonia’s foreign minister says NATOs encirclement of the Baltic Sea has made life more difficult for Russia.
JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images

“This is tremendously important that the Baltic Sea is now a ‘NATO lake,'” he said. “Everybody who understands anything about defense understands that this is changing a lot in strategic ways.”

The Baltic Sea has long been a flashpoint in Russian-Western tensions. Russia’s key naval bases in St. Petersburg—home of Moscow’s Baltic Fleet—and the exclave of Kaliningrad are central to the Kremlin’s regional, and at times global, power projection.

With Finland’s recent accession to NATO, there are now seven allies with Baltic Sea coasts. Russian warships seeking to reach the Atlantic Ocean must pass all of these coastlines.

The Baltic Sea is also home to significant European offshore renewable energy assets, and until recently was a conduit for huge amounts of Russian natural gas running through the Nord Stream pipelines to the EU. The pipelines were sabotaged by unknown actors in September 2022.

Finland became NATO’s 31st member in April, around 11 months after submitting its application. Helsinki’s membership process was politically smooth but had been delayed due to Turkish and Hungarian refusal to ratify Sweden’s proposed addition to the alliance. Helsinki and Stockholm initially wished to accede at the same time, but Finland decided to join alone amid a worsening Turkish-Swedish bilateral spat.

Sweden has still not joined the alliance, with the Turkish and Hungarian parliaments refusing a ratification vote. Both are widely expected to vote in favor of Stockholm’s accession after this month’s Turkish presidential and parliamentary elections.

NATO officials hope that Sweden will become the alliance’s 32nd member before or at the bloc summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July.

“It is important that Sweden will now officially become a member of NATO,” Tsahkna said. “They will.”

Vilnius Calling

The Vilnius summit is shaping up to be another historic marker for the 74-year-old alliance. Aside from its planned expansion, NATO is also under pressure to offer meaningful accession plans to Ukraine, which has long been denied membership for fear of provoking war with Russia. With Kyiv now deep in its existential war against Moscow, Ukrainian leaders have made clear their intention to join the bloc.

Successive Estonian governments have been among those pushing hard for Ukrainian membership of NATO, clashing with more cautious allies worried that admitting Kyiv will enrage President Vladimir Putin and draw the alliance into a direct conflict with Russia.

“We have to understand that NATO is the only realistic and working security guarantee to Ukraine, to us, to everybody,” Tsahkna said. Expanding the alliance, he said, is the only way to “guarantee that Russian aggression will not happen again, to Ukraine, or to the Baltics, or wherever.”

NATO and national leaders have acknowledged that Ukraine cannot realistically join the alliance while in the hot phase of its nine-year-long war with Russia. This puts the alliance in a tricky position.

Kyiv and its backers are demanding more than the vague, well-worn assurances that Ukraine will eventually become a member. But the traditional NATO next step—a Membership Action Plan detailing the requirements from a prospective new member—is arguably moot given Ukraine’s modern military and tight cooperation with the alliance. And a formal invitation would pull NATO into war.

Margus Tsahkna at press conference in Helsinki
Estonia’s Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna speaks at a press conference with his Finnish counterpart following their meeting in Helsinki, Finland on April 18, 2023.
ANTTI AIMO-KOIVISTO/LEHTIKUVA/AFP via Getty Images

The Vilnius declaration will most likely be a matter of wording. “I hope for a very clear message,” Tsahkna said. “And the next level—it’s the wrong word to say the roadmap—but the understanding and the message of what are the next steps…what will be the process, how it happens.”

“It’s a mindset question,” the minister added. “And I hope we can feel this mindset is in Vilnius, and one can understand that it is there. And Ukraine and Putin must understand that this is the message…These ‘gray zones,’ or sitting in the waiting room at NATO, is very, very dangerous. And it has been proven already twice in Ukraine and also with Georgia.”

NATO has other thorny matters to deal with outside of expansion. The 2022 Madrid summit prompted a major change in military posture, with allies agreeing to abandon the so-called “tripwire” concept that envisioned a small warning force along Russia’s frontier, which would almost certainly be quickly overrun in the case of an invasion.

The alliance—pushed hard by the frontline eastern nations—is adopting a more muscular posture to defend “every inch” of territory, as Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said. Estonian officials are calling for the deployment of more allied troops, pre-positioned stocks, and weapons systems—including anti-air and anti-missile defenses—and robust defense plans.

“It is important in Vilnius to talk about the NATO defense plans,” Tsahkna said. “They are real. We are working and developing them well, but these plans must be fulfilled with real capabilities.”

Alliance spending—long a sore subject—is also back under the microscope. The majority of allies are still not spending 2 percent of GDP on their militaries, a target agreed in 2014. Estonia and others want the alliance to adopt a new spending target of 2.5 percent, warning that Ukraine’s experience has shown just how unprepared NATO is for a full-scale, modern, attritional war against Russia.

“If we are not investing now, then it will be too late,” Tsahkna said. Estonia’s new coalition government has committed to spending 3 percent of GDP on its military this year, as Tallinn expands and upgrades its forces.

“We are not pushing anybody,” the foreign minister added. “We just explain to them.” Asked if raising the target at Vilnius is realistic given so many have failed to reach the existing goal, Tsahkna replied: “I expect that there will be clearer understanding that 2 percent is the minimum level, and even this is a big achievement.”

“We will just explain that for the next decade, there are arguments to discuss to invest more.”

“Unfortunately, we have to put more money to defense, I would prefer to put this money to education, or innovation, or benefits, or whatever. But the threat is real. We have a war in Ukraine. And we have to prepare ourselves against the threat of what may happen.”

The devastation of Ukraine is a potent example of what may happen. “We are the front-line countries,” Tsahkna said. “Even if everything is working well—everybody’s putting 2 percent or 2.5 percent in, NATO Article Five works and the political decisions and everything will be 100 percent successful—the war will still be in our territory.”

A Long War

Estonia and its Baltic neighbors are urging their NATO allies to admit Ukraine as soon as its war with Russia is over. But there is no sign that the fighting will end soon. Russia still occupies 20 percent of Ukraine, with its forces digging in across the south and east of the country to defend against a looming Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Putin has tightened control at home, and for all the public disputes between Kremlin power players, there appears little indication that the dictator’s control is weakening.

What constitutes a Ukrainian victory is a subject of fierce debate across the European Union and NATO. Kyiv has been clear that it intends to liberate all territory per its 1991 borders, which includes reversing the 2014 Russian seizures of Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region.

Ukraine soldier in trench near Bakhmut Donetsk
A Ukrainian serviceman is pictured in a trench in Chasiv Yar near the frontline city of Bakhmut, Donetsk region on May 3, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images

But even if Kyiv is successful, there is no guarantee that Putin would admit defeat.

“This is a unique situation,” Tsahkna told Newsweek of the possibility that Putin will keep fighting even after losing all occupied Ukrainian territory. What to do next, he added, “is the political decision for all of NATO.”

“We have to understand that NATO is a defensive organization,” he added. “We are not an organization which is planning wars against somebody. We must defend that. This is a question that we have to argue about when the real process has been started. This is what we want now.”

The outcome of Ukraine’s spring counteroffensive may clarify some of the outstanding issues about future territorial control and peace talks. Kyiv’s troops—thousands of them NATO-trained—will be armed with new Western weapons systems, including heavy armor, as they look to evict Russian occupying troops.

This week, the U.K. unexpectedly announced it has provided Ukraine with long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which Russia says have already been used in a strike on the occupied eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk.

Asked if Kyiv has more surprise weapons systems in store for the Russians, Tsahkna replied: “I hope so,” adding that announcing the provision of advanced weapons systems only when they are already in Ukrainian use is “a smart way to run the war.”

“We don’t know publicly in detail what actually we have sent, I mean we as the free world,” the minister added. “And of course, if there is a surprise moment from the Ukrainian side to Russia, it is always a good thing.”

Still, Tsahkna said—echoing remarks from other NATO officials and Ukrainian leaders—Western focus on the coming operation risks backfiring. “The message from [Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro] Kuleba to me, and also from [President Volodymyr] Zelensky to our prime minister and publicly, has been please don’t increase these expectations so high. Because this is a war, it takes a long time. Please continue, do not get tired.”

As to what constitutes success, Tsahkna said: “This kind of measuring isn’t helping Ukraine.”

“What I see is that everybody already, all over the world, is taking this everyday war news like it’s a weather forecast,” he added. “It’s a war. But what we have to do is to explain more and more about what is really going on. And it’s not only the war and conflict between soldiers. It’s a genocide, it’s rape, it’s the deportation of kids.”

“We have to not get tired of that. We have to explain, we have to keep doing it every day. This is hard for everybody if you’re not in the war. We’re not in the war directly. But we are indirectly. But they are fighting for our freedom…We cannot get tired.”

Tsahkna warned against the conversion of foreign fatigue to pressure for peace talks. “We cannot just think about finding a peace,” he said. “It’s awful what is going on, but we have to restore this situation on the international level.”

Tsahkna added that the prosecution of Putin and his top officials for the crime of aggression—a key Ukrainian proposal that has mixed support among its foreign partners—is “very important.”

“We have to follow the Zelensky peace plan,” the foreign minister said. “It is a very clear path. And if there will be any kind of changes, then they are up to the Ukrainians.”

Newsweek has contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry by email to request comment.

Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut bunker drone feed
Ukrainian servicemen of the State Border Guard Service watch drone feeds from an underground bomb shelter near the frontline city of Bakhmut, Donetsk region on May 3, 2023.
DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here