Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO. Her new book, “The Undersea War,” is out later this year.
As the world anxiously watches the Strait of Hormuz, another maritime drama is taking place right here in Europe.
This one, too, concerns geopolitics and a small body of water, though these ships don’t have to worry about drone strikes. They’re simply stuck, waiting — because in a desperate move to thwart Moscow’s rule-breaking shadow fleet, Ukraine has crippled Russian ports.
The resulting traffic jam in the Gulf of Finland is a clear snapshot of the deteriorating state of today’s world order.
On April 7, the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced it had hit the Ust-Luga oil terminal — a major port on Russia’s Gulf of Finland coast. “This facility is an important element of Russia’s petroleum export infrastructure, revenues from which are used to sustain armed aggression against Ukraine,” they said.
But that’s only the latest Ukrainian strike on Russian ports handling oil, the Kremlin’s largest source of revenue. Two days before its attack on Ust-Luga, Ukraine also hit the port of Primorsk. Before that, Ust-Luga had been struck at least twice, and Primorsk once.
Ukraine has targeted other Russian oil-handling terminals too, but Ust-Luga and Primorsk are particularly important because of how much oil passes through them: According to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air think tank, 20 percent of Russia’s oil exports depart from Ust-Luga and 22 percent depart from Primorsk.
Kyiv’s rationale is obvious: If Moscow can’t export oil, it won’t be able to finance its brutal war. For the same reason, Ukraine’s military has attacked Russian shadow tankers as well.
“The Defense Forces of Ukraine will continue to strike key enemy facilities both in temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine and within the Russian Federation until armed aggression against Ukraine is completely stopped,” the country’s military said in the announcement after its April 7 attack.
Kyiv’s approach has so far been successful: On several days over the past few weeks, no ships managed to dock at Ust-Luga and Primorsk at all, and even now, the ports’ capacities are significantly curtailed. On April 10, only two ships managed to dock at Primorsk, and after that, no ships are scheduled to until April 27. Ust-Luga, meanwhile, managed to receive some more vessels, but the number remains far below its usual volume.
Despite the strategic success, these attacks on Russian ports have created a mighty maritime pileup in the Gulf of Finland, with shiptrackers showing clusters of ships — mostly tankers — at anchor in the small body of water.
That’s because the ships waiting to receive Russian oil have to stay put. Legitimately sailing vessels can quickly be rerouted to other ports and tasks, but shadow vessels operate outside the official shipping system, and they wouldn’t want to call at other ports for fear of being detained. They simply have to wait for Ust-Luga and Primorsk to be repaired.
The result is dozens of ships backed up in the Gulf of Finland — around 40 alone in Estonia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), with the rest stuck in Finland’s. It’s an extraordinary scene: Rule-breaking ships, many of them sanctioned and barely seaworthy, anchored in Europe’s Baltic coast while Russian ports get repaired.
“From the security perspective, it is better to keep the ships in the anchorage area than allow them to drift around,” said Regina Palandi-Paju, Estonia’s deputy director for National Security and Defense Coordination. “Possible environmental pollution remains, of course, a concern in view of the overall situation — and we monitor the situation closely.”
Thankfully, “there is no noteworthy environmental impact for us so far,” the deputy director told me. If, however, one of the ships spilled during this lengthy stay, Estonia and Finland will have to clean it up.
No one knows for certain how much longer the wait will last, but until the ports are fully operational again, Finland and Estonia are stuck with their unwelcome visitors. The two nations can only hope that none of the ships spill or leak in the meantime, or that they don’t attempt to exploit the situation.
I’m not going to help Moscow by suggesting what these vessels could do — the Kremlin certainly doesn’t need help in that regard — but a large number of ageing Russia-affiliated ships backed up in Western waters is a troubling state of affairs.
It’s also today’s world order in a nutshell: Russia has violated the U.N. Charter by invading Ukraine, financing its illegal war by exporting oil on ships that violate maritime rules. In response, most U.N. member countries have failed to even give Ukraine the support it’s due under the U.N. Charter, so the country’s military turned creative, resorting to means that stretch what’s allowed under international law.
All this has left a rule-breaking armada in the waters of two of the world’s declining number of law-abiding countries.
Credit to both Finland and Estonia for steadfastly upholding those principles. Here’s hoping they don’t regret it.
