TIT-FOR-TAT tanker interventions in the Gulf of Finland should be worrying a wider audience than just the Estonian navy right now.

The fact that Russia last week saw fit to breach Nato airspace in defence of a shadow fleet tanker with no flag and no legitimate claim to Russia’s protection, revealed quite how low a tolerance Moscow now has to any disruption to its exports.

The fact that Russia has now detained a Greece-owned, Liberia-flagged tanker, apparently in response, suggests that it has no intention of backing down, and that this is no longer just an issue for Estonia, or the Baltic coastal states to figure out.

When the EU foreign ministers gather in Brussels on Tuesday they will have a long list of security concerns to consider, but the escalatory potential of an all-out tanker war in the Baltic should be pretty high up the to-do list.

Estonia has tried its best to hold passing shadow fleet vessels to account, but Russia’s demonstrated willingness to deploy military assets in protection of these ships suggest this is not going to be something Estonia, or even its neighbouring coastal states, can handle alone.

The growing list of sanctioned tankers (with another 200 expected to emerge on Tuesday via the EU), is only going to increase the number of stateless tankers operating in the service of Russian oil exports.

It will also increase the frequency of challenges by coastal states and increase the likelihood that Russia will make good on its threat of deploying naval escorts for tankers in the Gulf of Finland as a show of force.

Just as Estonia doesn’t have the naval capacity to challenge Russia’s protection alone, Russia does not have sufficient naval resources to escort the entire shadow fleet. But where does this stop? And how far are the EU foreign ministers going to be prepared to take this?

We are fast approaching the point of a major showdown where both EU and Russia accuses each other of impinging their freedom of navigation and from there things start to get very difficult very quickly.

Richard Meade
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List

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