2024-03-22 11:14:34
Sweden joined NATO in March after delays caused by Hungary’s delay in ratification. This significantly changed the balance of power between the alliance and Russia in the Baltic Sea. “The Baltic Sea is now a NATO lake,” boasted Latvian Foreign Minister Krišjanis Karinš.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has already made it clear that he is aware of the change in the rules of the game. “We have to strengthen the state of our troops in the northwest of the country because of Finland and Sweden,” he said in a speech to parliament. Both the Russian coast in the Kaliningrad region and the Gulf of Finland are now hemmed in from all sides by the alliance states.
This is good news for the three small Baltic republics – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They feared that the Russian army could occupy them in the event of an invasion after quickly crossing the so-called Suwal corridor, separating Belarus and the Kaliningrad region. The corridor runs through the territory of Lithuania and is 65 kilometers long. Before NATO would send reinforcements to the Baltics, it would be likely that the Russians would manage to occupy Latvia and Estonia as well.
2022 map showing the island of Gotland | Photo: NATO
While this threat has not completely disappeared, with the coasts of Finland and Sweden, the alliance has a much greater ability to respond more quickly across the sea. “We are now less vulnerable,” Krišjanis Karinš told The Financial Times. In some Baltic media and on social networks, there have been jokes and exaggerations about the fact that Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians wanted a pair of Scandinavian states in NATO more and for a longer time than the Swedes and Finns themselves.
The Financial Times was the first to publish information that Sweden will make the strategically important and well-situated island of Gotland available to alliance forces. He refers to the words of Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristensson. Dubbed the giant aircraft carrier of the Baltic, Gotland is only about 100 miles (160 kilometers) off the coast of Lithuania and Latvia, and Russian state television frequently mentions it as one of the potential battlegrounds in the Baltic Sea in its reports on the NATO threat.
“Whoever controls the island can significantly facilitate the supply of the Baltic states, or, on the contrary, significantly complicate it,” political scientist Mikael Norrby from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, told the AP agency.
Gotland has an area of almost three thousand square kilometers and about 60,000 inhabitants live permanently on it. The Swedish army has always had a base there, but in the 1990s it withdrew many soldiers from there. In 2005, the government decided to completely demilitarize the island, but ten years later, soldiers returned there in connection with the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula. The government there has also been spending a lot more money on defense and armaments since the year before last year, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.
“Sweden had an elaborate civil defense system during the Cold War, within which everyone had the option of taking shelter in times of crisis. But in the optimistic nineties, we dismantled a large part of this system. Preparation for war basically ceased to exist. There is a consensus in Sweden, that the security situation is the worst since 1945,” Swedish military analyst Niklas Granholm, who previously worked in the army of this Scandinavian state and was in charge of naval strategy, said in an interview for Aktuálně.cz in January.
The Russian threat to Gotland has a historical precedent. In 1808, during the so-called Finnish War between Sweden and Russia, the island was occupied by Russian troops. But the Swedish navy made a successful counterattack, and Gotland remained in the hands of the Swedes. But they lost the war and lost Finland.
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NATO chief: If Putin wins, it will be a tragedy for Ukrainians and a danger for us. | Video: Reuters