With Sweden's imminent accession, the Baltic Sea will become NATO waters - and Russia's leeway is dwindling. Only just under a tenth of the approximately 8,000 kilometer long coastline of the sea belongs to Russia.
The alliance also increased its maritime patrols in October 2023 in response to a series of mysterious incidents in which undersea cables and gas pipelines were severed near Finland, Sweden and Estonia. In Germany, a logistics port of Rostock is currently being built as a NATO deployment hub.