The region is like the Mediterranean but without the clutter—and very appealing to the Western alliance
The invasion was, of course, a fantasy, though not of Charlemagne’s making. It was’s own boffins who conjured up this imaginary invasion, setting the scene for a giant war game. Staged across northern Germany in mid-June and involving some 10,000 airmen from 25 countries, Air Defender 23 was the alliance’s biggest-ever air exercise.
For decades, such an invasion from the east seemed all too plausible. During the cold war the Western alliance was hopelessly outgunned in the Baltic region.planners assumed that neutral Sweden and Finland would sit warily by as a superior Soviet, East German and Polish flotilla ferried communist troops onto Danish and West German beachheads.
All that changed when the Berlin Wall came down. In 1990 East Germany vanished. Nine years later Poland joined. In 2004 formerly Soviet-occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania followed suit. Finland jumped on board in April and Sweden is clambering up the ladder as fast as it can. Long the dominant power in the Baltic region, Russia now occupies barely a tenth of the sea’s 8,000km shore—and a lot of that frontage is made up of soggy estuarine islands.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader and something of a history buff, could have read a few more books. This is not the first time that Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Black Sea has bounced back to hit it in the Baltic. In the mid-19th century Russian encroachments into the Ottoman Empire caused growing alarm in Britain and France. But when the allies acted to contain Russia, launching what became known as the Crimean war, the first place they struck was not in the south.
Why this interest in a cold, blustery inland sea? The fact is that for the past millennium the Baltic has been nearly as crucial and contested a trading link as the Mediterranean. The Hanseatic League, an archipelago of independent German-speaking trading cities spread across the sea’s southern shore, prospered by dealing in timber, twine, grain, metals and wool, among other things. For centuries Denmark was a regional superpower, its claim toonly eclipsed by a rising Sweden in the 17th century.
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