Shortly after midnight Swedish radar picked up six Russian jets streaking southwest over the Gulf of Finland.
Instead of veering south towards the Russian military exclave of Kaliningrad, the warplanes held their course and bore down on Gotland, a Swedish island in the middle of the Baltic Sea. It was Good Friday, the Swedish air force’s entire pool of fighter pilots were off duty and not a single interceptor jet could be scrambled to deter the intruders.
Unhindered, two Russian Tu-22M3 Backfire nuclear bombers fired. The first targeted an army base on the Swedish mainland. The second took aim at the country’s electronic surveillance headquarters on the outskirts of Stockholm, a couple of miles from Drottningholm Palace, the main royal residence.
Fortunately for Carl XVI Gustav and his family, the raid was purely a show of force and the nuclear missiles were imaginary. Yet the Gotland incident, which happened a decade ago next month, was a watershed moment, ramming home Russia’s military dominance in the Baltic region and the humiliatingly enfeebled condition of Sweden’s armed forces.
“It was a real wake-up call,” said Magnus Frykvall, commander of the army regiment that has now been established to defend the island.
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On February 24 last year Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine delivered another existential shock to the Baltic. Kaja Kallas, the Estonian prime minister, warned that Tallinn would be levelled and her country “wiped off the map” if it had to face a similarly vast offensive. Pekka Haavisto, the usually sober Finnish foreign minister, raised the spectre of Russia using weapons of mass destruction against his people.
This shock, however, electrified the West into action. Defence budgets have ballooned across the region. Poland has pressed ahead with a plan to more than double the strength of its army to 250,000 soldiers. Nato allies have deployed extra troops, armour, combat jets and sophisticated air defence systems to the Baltic rim.
Sweden and Finland have been shaken out of their traditional military non-alignment and applied to join Nato, which will in all likelihood bring Gotland and its command of the sea lanes under the alliance’s nuclear umbrella. “It makes the Baltic Sea look like a Nato lake,” said Vaidotas Urbelis, policy director of Lithuania’s defence ministry. “This is a huge advantage for our defence.”
It is a remarkable course of events for a region that used to be regarded by most western Europeans as a geostrategic backwater. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact it was seen as a poster child for the “end of history”, the triumph of liberal democracy and peaceful multilateralism. Russia scarcely appeared to bat an eyelid when Poland joined Nato in 1999 or when the three Baltic states followed suit in the “big bang” enlargement of 2004.
After the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, however, things began to change. The following year Russian warplanes simulated an atomic strike on Warsaw during joint military manoeuvres with Belarus. Nuclear-capable Iskander-M missiles were stationed in Kaliningrad, within theoretical range of Berlin, Copenhagen, Riga, Vilnius and virtually any target in Poland. Russian jets started routinely violating neighbouring countries’ airspace and “buzzing” Nato aircraft and naval vessels. A 2017 incident saw a Russian fighter come within 5ft of a US RC-135 reconnaissance plane.
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The jitters worsened after President Putin demonstrated his guile, audacity and disregard of international law by annexing Crimea in 2014. Over the next few years western wargames repeatedly suggested Nato forces would be overwhelmed in any battle for the Baltic, with the Russians seizing Vilnius, Tallinn and Riga within as little as three days.
Mart Kuldkepp, an Estonian historian at University College London specialising in the Baltic region, likened the sense of threat to spending years under the sword of Damocles. “If you’re constantly living with a sword hanging over your head, you kind of get used to it being there,” he said. “You don’t have the cognitive capacity to think about it all the time — it would be exhausting.”
The first year of the Russian war on Ukraine has been a harrowing lesson in what happens when the thread snaps and the sword falls. Yet it has also prompted Nato to start putting more flesh and steel behind the promise to defend every inch of the alliance’s territory.
Until last summer Baltic deterrence was based on the “tripwire” approach, under which a thin but well-drilled screen of about 1,200 Nato troops in each state served as a reminder of Article 5. At the Madrid summit in June this was beefed up into a “deter and defend forward” strategy, with plans for clusters of air and missile defence systems, more prepositioned equipment and a more substantial troop presence in the frontline countries.
So far the execution has been a little patchy. The four multinational forward presence battlegroups in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were reinforced, only to be scaled back again in some cases. The UK withdrew a 700-strong battalion from Estonia, leaving only 900 personnel behind. Germany began setting up an additional mechanised infantry brigade with a strength of up to 5,000 soldiers to help protect Lithuania but then admitted that most of them would be based 450 miles away in Neubrandenburg.
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The overall direction of travel, however, is clear enough. The arrival of Finland and Sweden in Nato — currently being held up by Turkey and Hungary — would also make an enormous difference. The two Nordic states may have abandoned their neutrality many years ago and established themselves as reliable “gold card” partners of Nato, but their presence in the alliance would bring all kinds of benefits.
In a recent War on the Rocks essay, Minna Alander of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and William Alberque of the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank, argued that Finnish and Swedish Nato accession would “fundamentally” alter the military geography of the entire region.
Nato would control the two choke points at either end of the Baltic: the Oresund strait between Sweden and Denmark, and both sides of the Gulf of Finland approaching St Petersburg. Kaliningrad could easily be cut off by a naval blockage from the rest of Russia, as Lithuania briefly demonstrated by blocking the transit of sanctioned goods across its territory last year. The 830-mile land border with Finland would become another source of distraction and a threat to the single route between mainland Russia and its nuclear bases on the Kola peninsula. “It’s a huge change: the map of the Baltic sea will be redrawn,” said Kai Sauer, head of political and security policy at the Finnish foreign ministry.
Gotland may be the clearest example of this strategic transformation. The island’s value for harrying enemy shipping, or protecting your own, has been clear since the Crimean war in the 1850s, when Britain and France used it as a foothold for attacking the Russian navy.
Today the potentially decisive factor is what is known in military jargon as anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD): the ability to puff up “bubbles” of ranged weaponry that deter the enemy from operating in the vicinity. Gotland is within easy striking distance of not only Kaliningrad but also Estonia and Latvia. Should it fall into Russian hands, it could allow them to hit Nato vessels in the surrounding sea at will, making it far harder to reinforce the Baltic states in the event of a war.
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Plugged into Nato, however, Gotland could have precisely the reverse effect, severing Russia’s routes to Kaliningrad and tipping the balance of power across the entire region. Since Sweden no longer has much A2/AD capability of its own, Magnus Frykvall, the commander of the Gotland regiment, said it was possible Nato allies could ultimately station their own missile systems on the island for this purpose. That would be especially useful if Russia’s own A2/AD bubble around Kaliningrad turned out to be as unreliable as suggested by Robin Haggblom, a Finnish defence analyst, in a recent paper for the Chatham House think tank.
For now, though, the priority is keeping the “little green men” away. Only five years ago the Russians could simply have strolled on to Gotland without firing a shot. In the early 2000s Sweden demilitarised the island, deciding that there were no more foreseeable threats to its territory.
What had once been a 25,000-strong Cold War force with a mechanised brigade, Viggen combat jets and coastal artillery batteries was reduced to nothing. Even the barracks were sold off to the local council. The Swedish soon realised the mistake, though, and re-established the old Gotland regiment in 2018.
The term “regiment” is a little aspirational for the time being. Frykvall has a single armoured battalion at his disposal, with 14 German-made Leopard 2 tanks, a number of CV-90 variant infantry fighting vehicles, and fewer than 400 full-time personnel. The plan is to build a 4,000-strong task force with an infantry battalion and artillery and anti-aircraft companies.
Frykvall said the chief concern was the danger of a Russian airborne and amphibious assault catching the island unawares. “Even if the [Swedish] units aren’t particularly large, it makes a big difference,” he said. “If you’re going to seize a totally undefended island it could be more or less like Crimea, but if it’s a defended island then you need to start a war.”
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The sword of Damocles is still dangling over the region. For now most of the Russian military’s strength is bogged down in Ukraine, which has cost Moscow many elite units and exposed serious structural weaknesses, particularly in the navy and air force. However, the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service warned last week Russia was still capable of exerting “credible military pressure” on the Baltic states and could entirely rebuild its western military district in less than four years.
Sauer, the senior Finnish diplomat, said: “No doubt it will come back at some point. If you ask when they would get back to previous levels, I don’t know; I’m just relying on military estimates, and they vary from one year to several years.”
Even if Russia’s approach to the Baltic has been “bark but no bite”, as Donatas Kupciunas, a Lithuanian geopolitics scholar at Cambridge University, suggests in a forthcoming essay, no one is inclined to let their guard down. Last June Putin compared himself to Peter the Great waging war on Sweden in the early 18th century, when the tsar made Russia the dominant power in the Baltic region. The sea is still vital for St Petersburg, Putin’s native city. And ordinary Russians believe Poland and the Baltic states pose only marginally less of a threat to their country than Ukraine does, according to a new Levada Centre poll for the Estonian foreign ministry.
“No matter how it ends in Ukraine, I can’t see that Russia will be a friendly country in the near future,” said Frykvall, the regimental commander on Gotland. “And as long as you have a big neighbour with hostile intent, it’s a security risk.”
