An interview with Dr Gregory Simons, Associate Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden. Interviewer: Mario Giagnorio

Despite being at the political margins of Russia’s foreign policy, Sweden’s political élite is weighing the NATO option. Their choices in security will play an important role in the Baltic Sea area in terms of stability.

In the context of new levels of co-operation between western-aligned countries in the Black Sea region, NATO should focus on pursuing meaningful actions with regional partners that share its vision. At the same time, the Alliance should take advantage of every opportunity to make the region a platform for decreasing conflict and accommodating competing interests.

The recent NATO-Georgia Public Diplomacy Forum held in October 2019 rightly underlined the need for new ideas, skills and partnerships. It also stressed the need for viable security structures that are capable of meeting modern challenges. These needs are especially relevant when considering the current geopolitics and geoeconomics of the Black Sea region.

Gains of reform are threatened amid an exodus of Ukraine’s revolutionaries from patrol police. And failure to reform the upper echelons of the police could mean a return to the old corrupt and inefficient practices.

When Ukraine introduced a new and radically reimagined patrol police in 2015, Nazar Franchuk was one of the first to sign up. Franchuk, who spent the winter of 2013-2014 splitting his time between university exams and protesting in Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, wanted to bring his revolutionary energy to the new law enforcement body which was intended to replace the country’s notoriously corrupt police force.

An interview with Lieutenant General Sławomir Wojciechowski from NATO’s Multinational Corps Northeast. Interviewer: Jakub Bornio

JAKUB BORNIO: Both the status of the Multinational Corps and the international security environment is very different today from when the corps was created in 1999. How would you assess these changes?

SŁAWOMIR WOJCIECHOWSKI: Preparing for the 20th anniversary of the corps and examining its beginnings, I came across some documents that surprised me. It turned out that even though there has been a changing security dynamic, the unit that I have come to lead (since 2018 – editor’s note) has always had objectives that corresponded to the geographical location, being able to function on a defined area. At the time the threats associated with the region were perceived as very unlikely, and objectives outside of our region seemed more likely. The difference today is that we don’t speak of the same elements that were on the agenda back then, they have been somewhat erased. Today, we only speak of ensuring security for the region.

A review of The Shadow in the East. Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front. By: Aliide Naylor. Publisher: I.B. Tauris, London, 2020.

In the final episode of our special series on Black Sea security, Adam and Maciek discuss the most recent NATO meeting of heads of states in London.

After 70 years in the security and defence business, NATO is still the most successful alliance the world has ever seen, and still the only “kid on the block” able to defend Europe against the villains in its the neighbourhood.

This episode launches a special series on security, Georgia and the Black Sea region.

The annexation and militarisation of the Crimean Peninsula has given Russia greater access to use enhanced military capabilities to project its forces in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East and apply pressure on the other countries in the region, particularly Ukraine and Georgia. In response, NATO and the Euro-Atlantic community have started developing a new approach to Black Sea security.

The Black Sea region over the centuries has been the subject of interest of empires and powerful states. The region, as a security space, has a complicated history. It combines a central maritime space with limited access and coastal areas that link it to the regional security complexes of Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East – and that often intersect and overlap.

Turkey’s policy in the Black Sea, which mainly aims to deter NATO’s presence in the region, has diminished its overall role, making it more vulnerable to Russia’s growing influence. Russian’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a clear signal that the Black Sea is gradually becoming a Russian lake, upsetting the equilibrium that has been in place for nearly a century.

Despite centuries of political and military conflicts and other power dynamics around the Black Sea, there has never been a period in history when a common conception of the Black Sea region existed – not even among the littoral states. Accordingly, the Black Sea region has gradually evolved into a unit of analysis, a sort of framework under which certain power dynamics are analysed by different scholars and policy-makers.

The Black Sea has always been an important geopolitical theatre. The November 2018 Russian attack on Ukraine’s naval convoy illustrates the Kremlin’s desire to assert dominance in the region and causing greater insecurity and uncertainty for those pro-western states that are situated along the sea coast.

The Black Sea, though serving as an extension of the wider Mediterranean space, has always been strategically important in global politics. The level of interest global powers have expressed in the region has varied from time to time, but the sea has its own merits as a space where historical steppe lands from the north, the isolated South Caucasus, the wider Middle East and the Mediterranean met each other.

The choice of Kaliningrad as one of the venues hosting the World Cup was carefully thought through by the organising country. Is it another show of force in the Baltic region or an attempt to normalise and calm tensions?