NATO’s sub-conventional deterrence: The case of Russian violations of the Estonian airspace

ABSTRACT

The question of how to deter sub-conventional activities—characterized by a limited role for the use of force—is one of the biggest puzzles in security studies. A way forward might be to use an enduring rivalry conflict management framework and to focus on findings from criminology. As the case study of 56 Estonian airspace violations suggests, executing sub-conventional deterrence is not an easy task to achieve. NATO’s deterrence success remains elusive, because there is no consistency in responding to these violations and no meaningful punishment. Yet many changes in frequency, intensity, and volatility of Russian intrusions over the last two decades indicate that a successful dissuasion, if not de-escalation, is still possible. To achieve that, NATO needs to improve information transmission, define its deterrence goals more narrowly, impose group-level costs, and implement dynamic deterrence mechanisms offering alternative modes of behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Airspace violation
• Estonia
• NATO
• deterrence
• criminology
• rivalry

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank anonymous reviewers and Hylke Dijkstra for their comments and suggestions that helped me make this text better.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 If we understand, what nuclear or conventional deterrence means, then there is no need to spend too much time on defining sub-conventional level, because it covers everything that the previous two categories left out—including terrorist, cyber, and hybrid threats. Of course, there are no strict boundaries between these analytical categories and one can also identify many overlaps. But an added value of using the concept of sub-conventional warfare, especially compared to much more process-oriented hybrid warfare, is precisely that ability to supplement the existing theoretical foundations without leaving anything out.

2 This arrangement is nothing exceptional within the Alliance. Skies over Albania, North Macedonia, Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Iceland are similarly policed by other NATO allies.

3 A neighboring sector of the Russian airspace belongs to a FIR administered from Estonia.

4 According to Valery Saar, then the Commander of the Estonian Air Force, a Russian civil air traffic controller was actually in radio contact with a Russian Navy aircraft close to Vaindloo Island during one of the incidents in 2005. However, the pilot rebuked a request to change the course to avoid the Estonian airspace by saying that he was flying the route he had been ordered to fly (see Postimees, 2007).

5 Personal interview with Mart Vendla, April 13, 2020.

6 Personal interview with Mart Vendla, April 13, 2020.

7 The Finnish case is slightly different. There were no Finnish airspace violations by Russian state aircraft for almost four years after the talks, namely between late 2007 and late 2011. Then the number of these violations rebounded as well (see Kiviranta, 2016).

8 The publicly available data in this article are primarily from the Estonian news sites err.ee and postimees.ee. The data were further checked with the Estonian Ministry of Defence and the Estonian Air Navigation Services in reference to the Public Information Act (RT I 2000, 92, 597), as well as with the Russian Embassy in Tallinn, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the news archive of the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation under [grant no 20-19693S].

Notes on contributors

Matus Halas

Matus Halas is a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague and he was previously a lecturer in strategic studies at the Baltic Defence College in Estonia. His research focuses on strategy and deterrence and his work appeared in European Security, Geopolitics, and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.