Northern exposure A journal published by Russia’s Foreign Ministry prints an article warning that the Baltic Sea could become a military theater — Meduza
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The Russian Foreign Ministry journal “International Affairs” recently published an article urging Moscow to view the Baltic Sea as a “potential theater of military operations.” Journalists at Agentstvo drew attention to the text on Tuesday, August 19. The monthly journal, whose editorial board is overseen by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, features essays on international politics, diplomacy, and global security. Meduza summarizes the boldest claims of the controversial text on the looming “Baltic danger.”

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In the text, ‘The Baltics: Guarantees of Danger’, Nikolai Mezhevich claims that Russia’s “adversaries” among the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and Northern Europe (particularly Finland) are forming a so-called “gray zone” in the Baltic Sea. Mezhevich, a chief research fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Europe, writes regularly about the foreign policies of the Baltic countries and NATO’s military activities in the region. He has been publishing in International Affairs since 2016 and often appears in the Russian media with warnings about alleged plots by Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania against Minsk, Moscow, and ethnic Russians.

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[The author] concludes the article with a warning that “geographic location and a complex of historical narratives” force Russia and its adversaries alike to consider the eastern part of the Baltic Sea as a “potential theater of military operations, possibly in classic, possibly in ‘gray’ formats.”

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