Paul Goble
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s premier journal, International Life, says the Baltic Sea region has become “a potential theater of military conflict,” one where there is no chance that regimes more amenable to Moscow will arise in the absence of a radical shift in the balance of power.
According to the article, the Western alignment of the Baltic region is a serious and growing threat to Russian interests, a challenge Moscow must respond to lest the West use its position there to threaten Russia and its interests.
The article’s zero-sum approach, in which all Western gains are Russian losses and vice versa, suggests that the Russian Foreign Ministry is coming into line with the Russian Defense Ministry, rather than acting as a constraint on its excesses.
Until Russian President Vladimir Putin decides on an action, it is often difficult to predict how Moscow will approach key foreign policy questions. This opacity partially reflects real policy debates in the Kremlin. It is also a form of maskirovka (disguise, маскировка), an effort to keep Russia’s opponents off balance and thus less able to respond effectively. The difficulty in predicting Putin’s next moves can be beneficial to the Kremlin, but it often makes it challenging for key Russian elites to prepare to assist Putin. Fortunately, for Russian elites, some media outlets in the foreign policy realm are more authoritative than others and reflect a degree of insider Kremlin knowledge. These key outlets merit the closest possible attention by those in the West who want to know where Putin is heading and thus how best to respond.
International Life (Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn, Международная жизнь), the Russian Foreign Ministry’s leading journal, typically reflects the emerging Kremlin worldview and the types of actions they believe would advance Moscow’s interests (Novaya Gazeta, August 21). Nikolay Mezhevich, a senior scholar at the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences, recently released a telling article in the journal. Mezhevich argues that the region around the Baltic Sea has become “a potential theater of military operations” because the West is now using the Baltic countries to threaten Russia (International Life, August 18). He asserts that Moscow has no choice but to take more serious steps lest the situation in that region deteriorate further, a view that puts the Russian Foreign Ministry in line with Russian defense commentators rather than acting as a constraint on them as it has sometimes done in the past (see EDM, May 23, 2024; Novaya Gazeta, August 21).
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