The Baltic States’ & Poland’s Withdrawal From The Ottawa Convention Won’t Change Much

Russia isn’t a signatory nor does it plan to invade any of those four countries.

The Baltic States’ and Poland’s Defense Ministers issued a joint statement on Tuesday announcing that their countries are withdrawing from the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (Ottawa Convention) in response to what they portrayed as new threats from Russia. Neither Russia, the US, China, nor India, et al. are signatories to this pact banning the use of these munitions. Ukraine, despite being a signatory, received anti-personnel mines from the Biden Administration in late November.

This week’s development follows Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk declaring earlier in the month that his country “must reach for the most modern capabilities also related to nuclear weapons and modern unconventional weapons”, the latter of which includes anti-personnel mines. It also came less than a week after the European Parliament “stresse[d] that the East Shield and Baltic Defence Line should be the flagship EU projects for fostering deterrence and overcoming potential threats from the East”.

The preceding hyperlinked analysis discusses those complementary defense projects that’ll run along their borders with Russia and Belarus, which are expected to play a key role in the EU’s planned militarization program. Only a fraction of the €800 billion that European Commission President Ursula Van der Leyen announced will likely be spent on this border defense megaproject, but it’ll nonetheless embody the bloc’s plans and function as a new Iron Curtain between the EU and Russia.

The Baltic States’ and Poland’s societies have largely been convinced by their governments that Russia might invade them in the future for no reason at all other than imperial bloodlust, but they also fear that the US might hang them out to dry, ergo why they’re now prioritizing their border defenses. In line with that goal, they decided to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention in order to legitimize their obtainment of anti-personal mines for deterrence purposes, at least from their perspective vis-à-vis Russia.

Seeing as how Russia has no interest in testing the US’ adherence to Article 5, let alone in occupying foreign populations that literally hate it and whose countries have nothing that it needs anyhow, their border defense megaproject (bolstered by anti-personnel mines) won’t change much. The only practical consequence of them building those fortifications and laying those munitions around them is the opportunity cost of investing public finances into these endeavors instead of socio-economic ones.

That’s a domestic issue though, and for however much their prioritization of defense issues over socio-economic ones might upset some foreign observers, their people don’t seem all that opposed to it except perhaps for the Baltic States’ ethnic Russian minorities and maybe a handful of Polish dissidents. The fact of the matter is that these policies are popular at home, their people are mostly willing to pay the attendant opportunity costs, and this makes their societies as a whole feel safer in their own way.

Likewise, Russia and Belarus might also do something similar along the Union State’s borders with those four and Ukraine, namely developing their own border defense megaproject that could also be bolstered by anti-personnel mines too (though Belarus would have to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention first). From the perspective of their interests, NATO used Ukraine as its proxy for trying to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia that would have then forced Belarus into vassalhood, which they might try to do again.

Even though the nascent Russian-US “New Détente” inspires cautious optimism from Moscow, it can’t be ruled out that their proxy war in Ukraine might either continue indefinitely or resume some years from now, with the worst-case scenario being that NATO wages a direct war on Russia. The latter might remain below the nuclear threshold due to the concept of “mutually assured destruction”, in which case conventional means would predominate, thus making the Union State’s border defenses invaluable.

Although any NATO-Russian hot war is likely to go nuclear shortly after starting, of the two scenarios that were discussed in this analysis (Russia invading NATO and NATO invading Russia but both resultant conflicts remaining conventional), only the second is semi-plausible while the first is far-fetched. That’s because NATO already has a track record of continuing to expand towards Russia’s border at the expense of the latter’s legitimate national security interests and then provoking a proxy war with it in Ukraine.

By contrast, Russia’s military footprint in Belarus is much smaller than NATO’s regional one and also began to assume its latest form long after NATO reached Russia’s borders, so the historical record accordingly testifies to NATO’s aggressive intentions, not Russia’s. In any case, neither Poland and the Baltics States’ defense plans nor Russia and Belarus’ speculative ones in response will change much, with the latest development only showing how tense this front of the New Cold War has become.