The Russian website Ritmeurasia published a report explaining how the Baltic Sea became NATO control, linking this to Finland's recent accession to the alliance and Sweden's expected accession after submitting an application.
The Baltic Islands in Sweden (Åland and Jutland) and in Denmark (Bornholm) have been demilitarized since 1856 following an agreement reached by Russia and the main European powers.
In 1946, the former Soviet Union and Denmark concluded an agreement according to which Russian forces would liberate Bornholm from the Nazis and return them to the Danish side on the condition that foreign forces would not be stationed there.
Different arguments
After Finland's recent accession to NATO, it and Sweden and Denmark began procedures to militarize these islands under various pretexts, including that the island of Bornholm was under Soviet occupation in 1946 and that the agreements signed under pressure from the occupation authorities were null and void, and that the situation in the Baltic Sea was exacerbated by Russian military measures.
The idea of turning the Baltic Sea into NATO's inner sea in the west has been lifted in 2018, and since then, Britain, Denmark and Norway have been involved in a program to equip their national navies with the U.S. Aegis combat information and control system.
Norway, Denmark and the United States are participating in a ground surveillance program that allows five RQ5 Global Hawk drones to be used to monitor ground targets located 4,16 kilometers from the launch site.
At the same time, military contacts between Norway, Sweden and Finland have intensified. Accordingly, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs suggests that the tripartite alliance will likely become a military-political alliance, in which Scandinavian members prioritize gathering intelligence on Russia's actions in the Baltic and Far North and adopting appropriate response measures.
Rejected allegations
The author rejected Helsinki's claim, which attributes the transformation of these islands into a military foothold for NATO to the worsening of the situation in the Baltic Sea by Russian actions, saying that the reality proves that the turbulent situation there is the result of NATO's offensive policy.
American journalist Seymour Hersh was quoted as saying that Norway, whose border borders Finland and turned into a British spy laboratory, supports Sweden, and in this way, NATO tightens its grip on the exits leading to Russia's northern border after gaining a foothold to penetrate the Barents Sea and the Arctic, the main base of the Russian Northern Fleet.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said the military infrastructure set up by NATO in Europe allows trained personnel from the U.S. Ramstein military base in southwestern Germany to be transferred to the Russian border in just two hours.