Russia is thinking of joining Turkey and China as a rogue nation at sea

Russia may be preparing to dispute maritime boundaries in the Baltic Sea. If it does, that could strengthen Turkey’s disputation of the Law of the Sea in the Mediterranean

The Aegean Sea (Photo by John T Psaropoulos)

On May 21, Russia’s foreign ministry posted a note on its legal portal, declaring Russia’s 1985 delimitation of maritime boundaries with Finland and Estonia as partially “defunct” and proposing to redraw them on updated maps. The following day, Russian border guards removed 24 navigation buoys from the Narva River, which forms the international border between Russia and Estonia. The buoys had been placed there by Estonian border guards earlier in May, in accordance with a delimitation agreement agreed with Russia before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas said, “Russia uses border issues as a means to create fear and anxiety.”^[1]

Turkey has done much the same in the Aegean, forcing a crisis roughly every decade since 1973, when it attempted a hydrocarbon exploration. China, too, has caused confrontation with the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan, as it attempts to expand its area of effective control over the South China Sea. A 2017 ruling by the International Court of Justice calling on China to adhere to the International Law of the Sea had no effect.^[2] Russia could be about to join the two countries that actively try to prevent the universal application of the Law of the Sea. That could be good news for Turkey and bad news for Greece.