Can NATO protect the Baltic Sea? AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Inquiry
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Can NATO protect the Baltic Sea?) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (The Inquiry) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.
The Inquiry episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog
Episode: Can NATO protect the Baltic Sea?
Author: BBC World Service
Duration: 00:23:01
Episode Shownotes
Accusations of sabotage have been made after a Chinese merchant ship cut through two important undersea cables in the Baltic Sea. Eight of the nine states in the Baltic are members of NATO but Russia has access to the sea from St Petersburg and for its Kaliningrad exclave. With previous
incidents of damage to underwater pipelines and cables, there’s concern that the security of critical underwater infrastructure is at risk from ‘grey zone’ activities - damaging but deniable incidents below the level of outright war. David Baker hears how countries’ security is threatened by incidents like these. The pipelines that were cut ran between Finland and Germany and Sweden and Lithuania. He asks who can intervene to protect these assets in the Baltic. Can NATO respond?EXPERTS: Elizabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Scowcroft Centre for Strategy and Security, a thinktank based in Washington DC in the US and the author of an upcoming book called The Undersea War.Helga Kalm, director of the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn, Estonia, an annual meeting dedicated to international security and foreign affairs.Marion Messmer, senior research fellow in the International Security Programme at Chatham House, an international relations think tank in London, UK.Tormod Heier, a professor at the National Defence University College in Oslo, Norway and a former officer in the Norwegian Intelligence Service.CREDITS: Presenter - David Baker Producer - Philip Reevell. Researcher - Katie Morgan Editor - Tara McDermott Technical Producer - Craig BoardmanImage Credit - Rex/Shutterstock via BBC Images
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_02
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
00:00:05 Speaker_03
But we're not fighting for us, just for the people back home.
00:00:10 Speaker_02
Purple Heart Warriors. Listen now by searching for dramas wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
00:00:22 Speaker_03
Welcome to The Enquiry with me, David Baker. Each week, one question, four expert witnesses and an answer. In November this year, 30 NATO vessels carrying 4,000 military personnel embarked on a 10-day drill in the Baltic Sea in north-eastern Europe.
00:00:49 Speaker_03
Their mission? To find ways to protect the elaborate network of undersea communications cables and gas pipelines that link the countries in the region.
00:01:01 Speaker_03
Two days before the fleet set off, two of those cables, one between Sweden and Lithuania, the other between Finland and Germany, had been severed by a Chinese ship dragging its anchor on the seabed.
00:01:15 Speaker_03
And that was just the latest in a series of attacks on the Baltic's undersea infrastructure that have taken place since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
00:01:28 Speaker_03
The countries in the region are worried, as events like these bring the war in Ukraine closer to Europe's borders. So in this episode of the Inquiry, we're asking, can NATO protect the Baltic Sea?
00:01:49 Speaker_03
The first signs of that most recent attack came on the morning of Sunday, November the 17th.
00:02:01 Speaker_07
the operators of a cable in the Baltic Sea connecting Sweden and Lithuania discovered that that cable had been damaged.
00:02:12 Speaker_07
Then, less than 24 hours later, the operators of another cable discovered that it too had been damaged and that cable is the only cable connecting Finland with Germany.
00:02:25 Speaker_03
Our first witness is Elizabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Scowcroft Centre for Strategy and Security, a think tank based in Washington DC in the US, and the author of an upcoming book called The Undersea War.
00:02:40 Speaker_07
What appears to have happened is that whoever damaged these two cables dragged its anchor across the cables. It transpired that one Chinese merchant vessel had been in the very place where these incidents took place at the time when they took place.
00:03:01 Speaker_03
That ship, a bulk cargo carrier called the Yipeng 3, had set off just a few hours before from a Russian port about 150 kilometres southwest of St Petersburg.
00:03:12 Speaker_07
The local authorities in Sweden and the other countries got very interested in this Chinese vessel and decided that they should follow it. And they followed it all the way through the Danish Straits.
00:03:26 Speaker_07
And then this vessel, the Yipeng 3, stopped in Denmark's exclusive economic zone. And that's where she remained.
00:03:35 Speaker_03
Undersea cables are sometimes accidentally damaged by ship's anchors. But Elizabeth says this incident, which involved two cables being cut, looks more suspicious.
00:03:45 Speaker_07
Seafarers know what it feels like when an anchor is being dragged. It slows the ship down. It's like dragging some major object behind your car when you drive.
00:03:57 Speaker_07
But these two incidents coming within 24 hours of each other and causing such significant damage seem to be a little bit more than an accident.
00:04:09 Speaker_03
Swedish investigators, who are looking into the incident, have found that one of the ship's anchors is indeed damaged.
00:04:15 Speaker_03
But the fact that the incident took place in Sweden's exclusive economic zone, rather than in its territorial waters, means their powers are limited.
00:04:24 Speaker_07
If they can't prove that the crew knew they were dragging the anchor, it's very hard to proceed with any sort of criminal investigation or indeed criminal case against them.
00:04:35 Speaker_03
If the cables weren't cut by accident, the big question, of course, is who was behind the attacks? Because, according to Elizabeth, it almost certainly wasn't the crew of the Yipeng-3 itself.
00:04:47 Speaker_07
she would have no commercial interest in harming undersea cables because she's just a bound carrier sailing from one port to the next. And that then leads us in the direction of Russia. She had just left a Russian Baltic seaport.
00:05:02 Speaker_07
She has had previous contacts with Russia, and Russia has already demonstrated in recent months and years it has an interest in harming its western neighbours. And harming undersea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea is one way of doing so.
00:05:19 Speaker_03
What do we think of China's involvement? Is China involved or is it just a coincidence that it's a Chinese ship?
00:05:26 Speaker_07
The involvement of a Chinese ship in this incident is a little bit surprising. China is not as much of an adversary to the West as Russia is.
00:05:38 Speaker_03
But, she says, it does look very likely that China was involved.
00:05:41 Speaker_07
Chinese government keeps a close eye on the shipping sector.
00:05:46 Speaker_07
It would be extremely surprising if a Chinese merchant vessel worked with Russia or on behalf of Russia to damage Western undersea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea without tacit agreement of the Chinese government.
00:06:02 Speaker_03
The fact that it's hard to pin down exactly what happened and who was behind the damage to the cables is, Elizabeth says, characteristic of attacks like this.
00:06:11 Speaker_07
the Russian Navy were to have sailed out to cut the cables, that would have been an act of war. It's different if a merchant vessel, so a civilian ship, engages in acts of aggression, and that's why it's so clever to have merchant vessels do it.
00:06:30 Speaker_07
This way, It's almost impossible for NATO or any of the affected countries in the region to respond because officially it was just an accident and it was just a Chinese bomb carrier.
00:06:45 Speaker_03
The Yipeng-3 is currently stationary in international waters off the coast of Denmark, surrounded by vessels sent by Danish and German authorities. China's said that it's willing to work with investigators to find out what happened.
00:06:59 Speaker_03
Russia has denied involvement. Nonetheless, regional politicians, including Germany's defence minister, Boris Pistorius, and Ulf Christensen, the prime minister of Sweden, have said they believe this was an act of sabotage.
00:07:14 Speaker_03
And that would be just one more indication of the heightened geopolitical tensions in the Baltic Sea.
00:07:30 Speaker_02
Part 2. The Baltic's strategic importance.
00:07:38 Speaker_03
The Baltic Sea is an extension of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Europe, covering an area of about 350,000 square kilometres and almost entirely surrounded by land.
00:07:49 Speaker_06
There are nine countries around the Baltic Sea. Eight of those are members of NATO. The countries are the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Nordic countries like Finland, Sweden and Denmark, as well as Poland and Germany.
00:08:04 Speaker_06
And there is also Russia.
00:08:06 Speaker_03
Our second witness is Helga Kamm, director of the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn, Estonia, an annual meeting dedicated to international security and foreign affairs.
00:08:17 Speaker_03
She says the Baltic Sea's geopolitical significance comes from the access it provides to the rest of the world.
00:08:23 Speaker_06
A lot of the shipping goes from the Baltic Sea countries out to the Atlantic and then from there onwards to different places to China or to North America or South America or Africa or pretty much anywhere in the world.
00:08:39 Speaker_06
And there's a lot of, for instance, oil tankers that come through here and other kinds of ships. So it's a very large and busy trading route for the entire region. It's an extremely important trading route for Russia.
00:08:50 Speaker_06
A lot of its trade happens through the Baltic Sea. It's trading oil also. It's the main way of getting goods in and out of St. Petersburg area.
00:08:59 Speaker_03
As well as St. Petersburg, Russia's other point of access to the Baltic Sea is a tiny piece of Russian territory called Kaliningrad, on the eastern edge of the sea between Lithuania and Poland.
00:09:10 Speaker_06
Kaliningrad is a port city for Russia. It is cut off from the mainland of Russia, between Lithuania and Poland. It is sort of an outward hub for them. There's nothing much there other than a port and military infrastructure.
00:09:25 Speaker_03
But significantly for the region, and for the rest of Europe, Kaliningrad is also where Russia has based some of its nuclear missiles. Governance of the area is complicated, with so many countries sharing such a relatively small space.
00:09:40 Speaker_06
Each country has their territorial waters. And then there are exclusive economic zones where the country's rights are more limited. And then there are international waters as well. So there are three different types of water areas in the region.
00:09:56 Speaker_03
And it has become even more complicated since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Russia stopped cooperating with the other eight countries in the region.
00:10:04 Speaker_06
The war in Ukraine has meant that it is more difficult to work with Russia on a number of issues.
00:10:11 Speaker_06
Since they have shown that they do not like the existing order that was put in place after World War II, they want to revise European security architecture, which makes all the other countries around the Baltic Sea a little more hesitant.
00:10:26 Speaker_03
That breakdown in regional cooperation has been felt especially hard in Helga's home country, Estonia.
00:10:33 Speaker_06
Estonia's location makes it vulnerable because we are a neighbour of Russia.
00:10:38 Speaker_06
So for Russia to exit St Petersburg and travel towards Kaliningrad or out of the Baltic Sea into the North Atlantic, it usually travels by Estonian exclusive economic zone, so along our territorial waters. So we are just an easy target for them.
00:10:55 Speaker_03
And, she says, that proximity means that Estonians were less surprised than many when Russia invaded Ukraine.
00:11:02 Speaker_06
For Estonians, the war in Ukraine or the full-scale war was not as big of a shock as it is for the rest of the world. We looked closely for years at the signals Russia is sending out, and it's clear that they are very aggressive and discontent with
00:11:19 Speaker_06
how the post-Cold War world has turned out for them. They're struggling with it, and oftentimes they use this tactic that when things are going bad internally, they start small wars outside of their own territory.
00:11:32 Speaker_06
So they're a little bit of an unstable neighbor. We would love to have a neighbor like Finland on the East, but it's clear that Russia is a much more difficult neighbour.
00:11:41 Speaker_06
They like to bully, they like to show their strength and they like to show who's sort of controlling the show, which makes it difficult to have good neighbourly relations with them.
00:11:50 Speaker_03
Helga warns that from an Estonian point of view, the world might be putting too much confidence in the fact that eight of the nine nations around the sea now belong to NATO, a fact that's led some observers to call the Baltic Sea a NATO lake.
00:12:05 Speaker_06
some people saying that the Baltic Sea is now a NATO lake, forgetting that, very importantly, Russia is not a NATO member.
00:12:13 Speaker_03
NATO has strengthened its presence in the region, especially after Finland and Sweden joined the alliance.
00:12:18 Speaker_06
It has improved NATO's visibility in the region, but overall, we still remain vulnerable.
00:12:25 Speaker_03
And that concern is especially apparent on the Baltic Sea floor, where much of the region's communications and energy infrastructure is located.
00:12:43 Speaker_05
Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service.
00:12:48 Speaker_00
A year ago, the libertarian Javier Mele became president of Argentina. Wielding a chainsaw, he promised to slash government spending and to create the world's freest economy. I'm Charlotte Pritchard.
00:12:59 Speaker_00
Join me to find out how Mele is changing the lives of Argentines.
00:13:04 Speaker_05
Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
00:13:20 Speaker_02
Part 3. Under the waves.
00:13:25 Speaker_01
The infrastructure in the Baltic Sea is really vulnerable. And that's not just the case for the undersea infrastructure, such as data cables or gas pipelines.
00:13:36 Speaker_03
Our third witness is Mariam Mesmer, Senior Research Fellow in the International Security Program at Chatham House, an international relations think tank in London, UK.
00:13:46 Speaker_01
It's also the case for the near shore infrastructure. That's, for example, renewable energy infrastructure such as tidal wave power plants or wind parks or whatever else you might have there.
00:13:59 Speaker_01
Because a lot of that infrastructure was built at a time when the Baltic Sea was relatively peaceful and essentially when the worst that we expected would have happened to any of this infrastructure is damage through regular shipping traffic.
00:14:19 Speaker_03
That all changed in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. In September that year, three Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany were damaged by explosions and put out of action.
00:14:33 Speaker_03
Just over a year later, the Balti Connector gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia and two adjacent telecommunications cables were cut by a Chinese ship dragging its anchor.
00:14:45 Speaker_03
And just a few days later, a Russian data cable between Kaliningrad and St Petersburg was damaged.
00:14:52 Speaker_03
And just as in the most recent incident that we heard about from our first witness, the damage to the communications cables between Sweden and Lithuania, and Finland and Germany, in these cases too, it's not easy to be sure who was behind them.
00:15:07 Speaker_01
it was never quite clear who the actual aggressor was. The Baltic Connector, the assumption is fairly strong that Russia was behind that one just because it was the connection between Finland and Estonia.
00:15:22 Speaker_01
It's a part of the Baltic Sea that Russia cares a lot about and two states that Russia often tries to intimidate.
00:15:29 Speaker_01
In the case of Nord Stream, there were actually rumors going around for a while whether this might have been a Ukrainian attack in order to show European allies that they can't trust Russia or in order to disrupt the relationship between Europe and Russia further.
00:15:47 Speaker_03
And that severing of a Russian cable between Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg?
00:15:51 Speaker_01
I don't know who's behind it for sure, but what's really interesting about this is that Western countries or NATO countries or whoever might have been behind it don't normally very openly take part in those kind of countermeasures.
00:16:07 Speaker_01
Someone, presumably a state that is in that area, deliberately decided to give Russia a taste of its own medicine.
00:16:16 Speaker_03
That vagueness about who is behind all of these attacks, Marion says, is characteristic of what is known as hybrid or grey zone warfare. Conflict that takes place just below the threshold of actual war.
00:16:30 Speaker_01
When we talk about grey zone activities or grey zone attacks, then we're essentially talking about this space where war has not been officially declared yet, but it's also not entirely a peaceful environment.
00:16:43 Speaker_01
So you are probably in an area where tensions between states are quite high, and you might see various activities that disrupt daily life, that
00:16:54 Speaker_01
make infrastructure more difficult to operate or maybe even damage infrastructure quite significantly, because you could imagine a significant sabotage attempt on, for example, critical national infrastructure.
00:17:06 Speaker_01
But if it is something that could maybe be a technical malfunction or could be attributed to a non-state actor, where it's not clear whether it's criminal activity, whether it's nefarious activity, whether it's actually another state,
00:17:19 Speaker_01
then governments probably won't want to risk going to war if it's not 100% clear that this was indeed intended as an act of war.
00:17:27 Speaker_03
Despite this, NATO has strengthened its presence in the region. In October this year, just before that latest cable incident, it set up a new task force to coordinate responses to underwater attacks.
00:17:41 Speaker_01
The Commander Task Force Baltic is an attempt to pull together NATO knowledge on the Baltic Sea. to really increase the information exchange between NATO member states.
00:17:53 Speaker_01
The other really important signalling function of this is to showcase Russia that NATO is present, NATO member states are acting in solidarity with one another and that they won't be divided over this issue.
00:18:21 Speaker_03
Our fourth witness is Tormund Heyer, a professor at the National Defence University College in Oslo, Norway, and a former officer in the Norwegian Intelligence Service.
00:18:33 Speaker_03
He says we'll see more of those hard-to-attribute, hard-to-respond-to attacks in the future, because their real power lies in the way they can demoralise an enemy state's population and influence its politics.
00:18:46 Speaker_04
Political polarisation inside the NATO countries will increase because the citizens, if they start to lose confidence in their own government because the citizens do not see,
00:18:59 Speaker_04
that the government is able to protect them and provide them with basic safety against these Russian hybrid threats, that will in a way start to polarize the political landscape.
00:19:10 Speaker_04
And that makes it harder for the moderate political parties in the center of the landscape to maintain a long term cohesion inside their own communities,
00:19:21 Speaker_03
And, he says, it's equally significant that Russia has positioned those nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad.
00:19:27 Speaker_04
You know, they have their biggest impact as long as they are not used, because they have primarily a psychological effect to make some kind of apprehension and scepticism and even fear within the decision-making processes in European NATO states.
00:19:46 Speaker_04
so that NATO will not respond too harshly against Russia if Russia does something wrong.
00:19:55 Speaker_03
All of this is very similar to the psychological brinkmanship that took place between NATO and the Soviet Union in the Cold War in the 20th century. But with a key difference,
00:20:06 Speaker_03
The fact that we all live now in a digital world, where cutting an internet cable can cause significant disruption.
00:20:13 Speaker_04
This time, the primarily logic unfolds with hybrid warfare techniques that in a way just reflects the modern society that we have today, which is extremely digitalized.
00:20:26 Speaker_04
And one of the most digitalized regions in Europe, where this hybrid warfare unfolds, that is exactly the Baltic Sea region.
00:20:35 Speaker_03
Another advantage to Russia of hybrid warfare, he says, is that it is less likely to trigger what is called an Article 5 response from NATO, when all 32 members of the alliance respond to an attack on one of them.
00:20:52 Speaker_04
Both have an interest in keeping the war below the threshold of war, which means that the most likely wars in the years to come will maybe be what we call economic warfare, rather than military warfare.
00:21:05 Speaker_04
Because it's less risky to attack, for instance, Norwegian oil rigs or gas pipelines that supplies Britain or Germany with oil and gas. That might be risky of course, but I'm not quite sure if that will be enough to trigger an article 5 from NATO.
00:21:27 Speaker_04
These are the exact thresholds that Russia carefully are trying to test. How far can we go without risking world war 3 with nuclear weapons?
00:21:38 Speaker_03
And another advantage from Russia's point of view is that NATO's ability to contain these hybrid attacks is limited because they're not what it was set up to respond to.
00:21:48 Speaker_04
NATO is by and large a military organization. But what is targeted here is not Europe's or America's military forces. What is targeted by Russia is the political will to use its forces.
00:22:04 Speaker_04
As long as the conflict unfolds below the threshold of war, the tasks will primarily be police tasks belonging to the individual NATO states in this region.
00:22:20 Speaker_03
So to return to our question, can NATO protect the Baltic Sea? Well, the short answer is not easily. All those communications cables and gas pipelines that run across the Baltic sea bed are exposed and vulnerable.
00:22:39 Speaker_03
And as we've heard, attacks on them can be very effective and pretty much risk-free. And because of the way it's set up, NATO can't directly respond unless an actual war is declared.
00:22:52 Speaker_03
That said, the NATO drill that took place in the Baltic in November was certainly a show of force, and it was designed to find ways of detecting potential threats before they happen.
00:23:03 Speaker_03
And if nothing else, that may at least act as a deterrent to anyone considering another attack on the Baltic's underwater infrastructure.
00:23:12 Speaker_03
A final word from our first witness, Elizabeth Braw of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security in Washington, D.C.
00:23:22 Speaker_07
Russia has concluded that the way to harm NATO's member states in the Baltic Sea is to use non-military aggression. And at that point, NATO is no longer in charge of responding to the aggression, but nobody else is either. And that is today's dilemma.
00:23:40 Speaker_03
This episode of the Inquiry was presented by me, David Baker. The researcher was Katie Morgan, producer Phil Revell, the editor was Tara McDermott, and the technical producer, Craig Boardman.
00:24:00 Speaker_05
Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service.
00:24:05 Speaker_00
A year ago, the libertarian Javier Mele became president of Argentina. Wielding a chainsaw, he promised to slash government spending and to create the world's freest economy. I'm Charlotte Pritchard.
00:24:16 Speaker_00
Join me to find out how Mele is changing the lives of Argentines.
00:24:21 Speaker_05
Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.