WATER POLITICS

Almost a year ago, Russian border guards removed half the buoys that had been placed to mark the border between Russia and Estonia in the Narva River. Estonia’s government has repeatedly (and politely) reminded Russia to return the buoys, without which users of the Narva River have no way of knowing on which side of the border they are. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Russia has failed to do so.

Altering maritime borders is no trivial matter—especially when Russia is using force to try to redraw the map of Europe.

The Russian border guards arrived in the middle of the night between May 22 and 23, 2024. When they left, they took with them 24 buoys marking Estonia’s border with Russia along the Narva River. Although maritime borders are typically marked only on naval charts, not through visible cues, such buoys have long demarcated the two countries’ maritime border and allow anyone using the Narva River to know which side of the border they are on—which is particularly important for Estonians being careful not to stray into Russian waters.

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the arrangement worked satisfactorily. Since riverbeds shift, every spring—just before the summer season, when all manner of anglers, small-boat owners, and canoeists use the river—the two sides would assess the Narva’s riverbed and correspondingly adjust the light buoys marking the border.

Last spring, Estonia repeated the procedure the way it has done every year. But there was one major difference: In 2023, Russia had declared that it disagreed with Estonia’s proposed positioning of the buoys. So last year, “we decided to release the floating marks into the water for the summer season according to the 2022 agreement, because they are necessary to avoid navigational errors, so that our fishermen and other hobbyists do not accidentally wander into Russian waters,” Eerik Purgel, the head of the Estonian Border Guard Bureau of the East Prefecture, said in a statement.

Russia, though, objected to the locations of around half of the planned 250 floating marks. What to do? Estonia decided to install the buoys anyway, in Estonian waters, on the basis of the border as it had been agreed in 2022. On May 13, 2024, Estonian authorities installed the first 50 buoys. Nine nights later, the Russian border guards removed half of them. Because the buoys were on the Estonian side, fetching them involved Russian guards intruding into Estonian waters to execute the removal.

Since then, they’ve been gone. Estonia could put them back, but Russia would simply take them away again. Instead, Estonia has been asking Russia to put the buoys back, arguing that they form the official marking of a legitimate border. Russia, alas, has not complied. The maritime border (or rather, its visible part) is gone.

Imagine if Russia or another country had unashamedly removed border markings on land. We’d notice it; in fact, it would be a huge deal, especially if it involved a NATO member state. But until now, water has been different, the borders more flexible and less visible.

Since the early 2010s, China has exploited the world’s lack of attention to maritime borders by starting to build artificial islands in parts of the South China Sea that belong to the Philippines and other countries. It was a blatant violation of internationally agreed borders, but since the construction proceeded gradually, a few concrete layers at a time, no one could think of what, exactly, to do about the violation.

Turning to an arbitral tribunal under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, as the Philippines did, changed nothing: Even though the tribunal unanimously sided with Manila, China simply ignored the ruling. Now China possesses artificial islands, complete with military installations, in these waters.

The buoys place Estonia in a conundrum. Russian nationalists have long indicated that they want to retake the Baltic states, annexed by force in 1940 and not freed until 1991, and they have plenty of advocates in the Kremlin. Removing border buoys is hardly the equivalent of a full-blown invasion, but it’s also not a negligible act. It is, in other words, gray-zone aggression—or, as former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves calls it, geopolitical microaggression. “It’s another silly game the Russians play,” he told me. “Just in the past few months, we’ve seen them put explosives in sex toys in Lithuania, we’ve seen the shadow fleet, we’ve seen cable cuts, and at the moment there’s a lot of GPS jamming in Estonia. It’s a constant policy of harassment. They’re letting us know that they’re there and can be a problem.”

Removals of maritime borders are far from the only Russia-related headache in the Baltic region these days. For the past 18 months or so, nations in the region have been affected by GPS jamming, most of which originates in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. Last year, Estonian authorities received 307 official reports of aviation disruptions, 85 percent of which related to GPS. The cause appears to be Russian jamming to protect its military installations, Estonian authorities say.

Regardless of the cause, GPS disruption poses a risk to aviation. Estonian authorities say civil aviation in Estonian airspace remains safe—if only because pilots and air traffic controllers know how to navigate without GPS. “Fortunately, there was a time before GPS, and people still remember the procedures and the equipment that ensure safety and navigational capability,” Mihkel Haug, a member of the board of the Estonian Air Navigation Services, told public broadcaster ERR News.

And this spring, Polish authorities uncovered Russian-steered aggression involving explosive-laden sex toys. The Polish authorities allege that on instructions from a GRU officer, a Ukrainian residing in Poland had inserted explosives into cosmetics, pillows, and sex toys; driven to Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital; and handed them over to a woman also working for Russia, whose task was to get the items to different places in the region where they would explode and harm, even kill, people.

Last fall, parcel bombs were discovered in airliner facilities in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Poland; prosecutors and intelligence agencies linked the parcels to Russia and said some of the parcels originated in Lithuania, though it’s not clear whether they too had been handled by the as-yet-unidentified woman with the sex toy explosives.

Compared with the risk of explosions, heaven forbid aviation accidents, the removal of maritime border markers may seems manageable. But a border is a border, even if it’s in the water. If Russia can remove the Narva buoys with impunity, it’s likely to conclude that it can disregard or alter other maritime borders, too. The removal of border buoys, though, falls short of the military attacks that NATO was set up to counter, and so does other gray-zone aggression.

“Even getting something onto the NATO agenda as an Article 4 matter is big,” Ilves said. “Even when we were targeted by the big cyberattack in 2007, we were blocked from putting it on the NATO agenda. Whenever we raise issues like these at NATO, we’re being told that it’s just below the level of outright aggression.” NATO’s Article 4 states that the “Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.”

In The Defender’s Dilemma, I set out ways in which the Western alliance can better detect and counter gray-zone aggression. Many of them include building and enhancing societal resilience. When I wrote the book, I didn’t think of border buoys as vulnerable to gray-zone aggression, but societal resilience can help there, too. Imagine if Russia (or China, for that matter) tried to alter another maritime border and ordinary citizens turned up in such numbers that taking action would result in civilians being harmed or even killed. Ilves has another solution: Europe, he said, needs an organization that focuses on threats that don’t quite meet the level of collective defense under NATO’s Article 5.

Either way, Estonia’s border buoys belong along its side of the maritime border with Russia. If we keep highlighting the issue, the Kremlin might just decide that altering the border isn’t worth the price.