The ongoing conflict in the Ukraine is only the latest flashpoint in a long-running economic, ideological and cultural contest between the very different world views of Russia and a progressive ‘West’. The Russian regime is defending an autocratic repressive system against western encroachment. Critically, this conflict is asymmetric, the latest iteration of a long struggle between freewheeling maritime economies, shaped by progressive-inclusive politics, capitalism and connectivity – and militarised autocratic regimes that use external threats to reinforce domestic control. These contests tend to be won by progressive coalitions exploiting the asymmetric leverage and financial power that flow from maritime/legal/economic approaches to conflict resolution. Russia has been defeated in many such conflicts.

In geographical terms, Russia’s access to the world ocean has always been compromised by maritime chokepoints (and polar ice), which leave the great bulk of its export economy, bulky products relying on shipping, or pipelines exposed to maritime interdiction, economic blockades based on international law, delivered by superior naval forces. Alfred Thayer Mahan explored this strategy through the British experience between 1660 and 1815, and it was adopted as the League of Nations’ preferred instrument to coerce aggressors in 1919. The inability of the League to execute it should not obscure the inherent power of the method.

While the strategic history of Russian empires across the last 1,000 years has focussed on the generation of military power and the acquisition of territory, the Russian economy, the basis of state power, has always depended on the revenues generated by bulk exports, forest products, timber, tar and pelts, along with agricultural surpluses of grain, hemp and flax, basic iron production and more recently hydrocarbons and military hardware. These bulky, low-value exports relied on maritime communications, ports and ships; the latter usually controlled by foreign powers.

Peter the Great recognised secure access to the sea was essential to economic development, and the modernisation of the state, waging several wars to secure access to and then control of the Baltic and Black Seas, beginning in the Sea of Azov, and the Gulf of Finland. In the 18th century, Russia partitioned Poland, acquired Finland, and neutralised Sweden to control alternative sources of naval stores and grain. Peter’s ultimate aim was Russian control of the Bosphorus and the Danish Narrows, to exclude hostile navies from these inland seas – a defensive necessity, rather an attempt to command the world ocean. Those ambitions were thwarted by Ottoman resilience and the dispatch of British battlefleets to balance the Baltic region, which it relied on for shipbuilding supplies and latterly grain.

These clashing agendas generated a two century-long contest for regional dominance, one that has been almost entirely ignored for the want of dramatic events, great battles and regime change. Britain blockaded Russia, blocking exports, which had no internal market, crushing revenues, and tax receipts. The conflict would end in 1919, when a small Royal Navy squadron helped secure the independence of the Baltic States and Finland, reducing Russia’s Baltic coastline to a few hundred miles around Petrograd.

In 1801 the Royal Navy secured control of the Baltic in battle at Copenhagen, breaking a regional coalition, while the economic threat prompted the murder of Czar Paul. Between 1807 and 1811, Britain and Russia were at war, one that no-one recalls because there was hardly any fighting, as Russia had joined Napoleon’s ‘Continental System‘, a pan-European economic counter-blockade of Britain. Controlling the Baltic secured naval stores and grain, and denied Russia access to alternative markets, notably France, which desperately needed to rebuild its navy.

By 1811 Russia was effectively bankrupt, leading Czar Alexander to change sides. He preferred fighting Napoleon’s Grande Armée to economic collapse. Britain helped Russia secure a negotiated peace with the Ottoman Empire, releasing Russian troops to engage Napoleon. British policymakers did not forget this war. After 1815 they developed alternative sources of timber and grain in Canada and blocked repeated Russian attempts to undermine the legal basis of British economic warfare, at the Vienna Congress, and the Hague Peace Conferences. Britain refused to discuss the primary strategic instrument of a seapower state. Russia funded massive coastal defence systems, notably for St Petersburg, but could not counter an economic blockade. Policymakers understood this post-Napoleonic ‘Cold War’ hinged on two key choke points – the Danish Narrows and the Bosphorus. In 1829 a victorious Russian army dictated peace to the Sultan at Adrianople, while a Russian fleet dominated the Euxine from Sevastopol. In 1833 Russia demonstrated it could move an army by sea to Istanbul far quicker than a British fleet, based outside the Dardanelles, could arrive. This mattered because Britain dominated Ottoman trade and investment – generating attractive returns. Economic access would be lost if Russia took control, using high tariff barriers to foster domestic industries.

While the Russians ostensibly arrived to secure Istanbul against an advancing Egyptian army, Britain, supported by France, demanded it withdraw, planned a Baltic fleet, and persuaded Sweden and Denmark to jointly and publicly declare the Baltic Narrows neutral in the event of a conflict. Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston stressed that Russia had been deterred:

Sweden and Denmark have formally declared that in the event of a rupture between us and Russia, they would be neutral; this is all we want. However, there will be no war this year between us and Russia. She has found that we and France are in real earnest about Turkey, and not only determined but prepared to resist her further encroachments in that quarter, and she will take good care not to put us to the test at least till her famine is over, and her fleet and batteries in the Baltic and Black Sea put into better condition.

After 1801 and 1807, Denmark had no desire to be the outer bastion of a Russian Baltic, while Sweden hoped to align with the western powers.

British suspicion of Russian agendas at the Bosphorus deepened as economic exposure increased. British and Russian economic agendas diverged sharply. Britain, pushing the agenda of free trade, creating a world empire of economic access, found Russian tariff barriers set up against her manufactured goods in conquered provinces. This approach would be reprised if the Ukraine was recovered. This shift was represented by the rapid rise of Odessa, the main port for Russian grain exports, which took few British imports. By contrast, Ottoman Turkey also sold grain but borrowed British capital and bought manufactured goods. Between 1842 and 1852 the number of British ships passing the Dardanelles increased from 250 to 1,741.

In the spring of 1853, Russia demanded a protectorate over the Sultan’s Christian subjects, effectively undermining Ottoman authority over one third of its population. The British reaction reflected economic risk. If Russia controlled Istanbul, British investments would be lost, while trade would cease, or face hostile tariffs. This crisis highlighted the importance of the Turkish market, prompting the British Chargé d’Affairs in Istanbul to declare: ‘the safety of our vast commercial interests’ was at least as important as issues of European policy and peace. This threat prompted British statesmen and lawyers to create an economic war policy to cripple the Russian economy without harming British commercial interests, or antagonising neutrals.

In a limited war this would require compromises. Measures were fine-tuned to hit Russia, a largely land-locked agrarian empire depending on imported technology and advanced industrial products, funded by bulky grain and timber exports. It began by blocking the export of British war materials to Russia, directly or via other European states, using a system of export licences. Cargoes that contained such items were declared contraband of war and could be seized by the Royal Navy. Russian access to key items, including Indian saltpetre, vital for high-quality gunpowder, was restricted. To avoid complications with key neutrals – namely the United States, Denmark and Sweden – Britain unilaterally limited the right of capture at sea but preserved the right to resume the older model in any future war.

The decision reflected the superior efficiency of blockades in relatively small landlocked seas in the age of the steamship. Modern systems can identify all ships moving on the world ocean, enhancing the precision of such measures, and the impact of economic warfare, emphasising the cross-dimensional nature of maritime strategy. British economic warfare between 1700 and 1945 relied on national level co-operation between the City of London, Parliament, the Admiralty and Lloyds of London. This could be replicated.

In the summer of 1853 Russia tried to enforce its demands by occupying the Danubian Principalities, essentially modern Romania, Ottoman provinces with a degree of local authority. Later Britain and France demanded Russia restore the territory to the Sultan, but their core concerns were geo-strategic and economic. The ultimatum expired at the end of March 1854, just as the Baltic ice began to break up at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, ensuring the Russian fleet would be trapped. The Baltic became a British lake, much as it belongs to NATO today, obliging Russia to mass 250,000 first class troops along the coast.

However, the allies did not invade Russia. An Anglo-French army sent to defend the Bosphorus was deployed by sea to the Crimea, to destroy Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol: the Russians sank their own Navy. With allied navies dominating the Black Sea, Baltic, White Sea and Pacific Russia’s economy was exposed. However, most Russian exports for 1854 had been purchased by British buyers in the autumn of 1853, making the 1854 blockade largely symbolic. The real blockade began with the 1855 season, the British government announcing that no purchases made in 1854 would be legal. With no alternative means to get these products to market the Russian economy stalled and collapsed within nine months. Imperial revenues fell dramatically: landowners could no longer pay their taxes, just as wartime costs exploded, while bread and draft riots undermined imperial authority.

Britain harnessed new technologies, steam propulsion, armour plate and long-range artillery to attack Russian fortresses, including Kronstadt, the guardian of St Petersburg. Steam gunboats took control of the Sea of Azov, critical to the logistics of Russia’s Crimean army, largely fed and armed via the Azov and the Don. It is no accident that Russia seized the entire Azov littoral in 2022. It has enormous economic potential.

With the allied soldiers no closer to Moscow than Sevastopol, Russia could concede a limited defeat without losing too much credibility, quietly abandoning old ambitions to control the Baltic and Black seas dating back 150 years. At the 1856 Treaty of Paris, Russia also signed away the right to build and operate warships on the Black Sea, a geo-strategic catastrophe, handing control of the Black Sea to the Ottomans and, if necessary, the Royal Navy, which could impose economic pressure on Russia’s primary exports whenever the two powers were in dispute, as they would be over Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and China across the next half century. The position in the Baltic was little better, a new coastal defence fleet and modern forts protected St Petersburg and a few key cities, but abandoned the sea to the British when they chose to re-enter the region.

The depth of Russia’s strategic defeat in 1854-56 was reflected in the scale, nature and duration of the reforms that followed. While Russia denounced Black Sea disarmament in 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War distracted diplomatic attention, it would be decades before a new Black Sea fleet appeared to contest command of the Black Sea, or the Baltic. The exports that kept Russia solvent remained exposed to naval interdiction.

In 1911 the Italo-Turkish War led to the closure of the Dardanelles to all shipping, which severely impacted the Russia economy, reinforcing the old agenda to secure the Straits, an aim that was conceded in the Anglo-French-Russian Treaty of London of 1915. This risk disappeared with the fall of the imperial regime, but it would be revived by Stalin after 1945 – when the balancing role fell to the United States. High-profile American naval visits to Istanbul, including the battleship USS Missouri, in April 1946, fresh from hosting the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay, deterred Soviet demands over the Bosphorus.

Today, Russian economic activity still relies on access to the world ocean, by ship or pipeline, through two landlocked seas and an icebound northern coast. Selling oil, gas and grain at low rates may support Russian diplomacy, and maintain cash flow, but this is not a viable long-term option. Long wars, like the Anglo-Russian conflict of 1807-11, tend to favour maritime economic actors over those seeking a military solution on land – if they have the political will to persist. Turning the economic screw by legal means offers a non-kinetic means of exerting significant pressure – and detaching some of its more pliable friends.

While the Crimean War offers little insight to those focused on cyber war and drones, the fact that it was won by economic pressure, not battlefield prowess, should give all those engaged cause to pause for thought. The obvious need is a strategy to maximise economic pressure in line with geo-strategic considerations. As British strategy during the ‘Crimean’ War demonstrated, there are sound precedents, and suitable models.