Institutionalised Maritime Coercion: The Base++ Scenario

The scenario

The conflict is moving beyond conventional sanctions and localised strikes toward a broader system of maritime coercion. Ukraine is targeting Russian energy and shipping infrastructure, while European states are increasingly prepared to physically intercept vessels associated with Russia’s shadow fleet. In response, Russia may seek asymmetric options: unmanned surface vessels, proxy actors, ambiguous attacks, and technology transfers designed to spread insecurity beyond the Ukrainian theatre.

The strategic logic is one of cheap coercion. A limited number of low-cost, difficult-to-attribute attacks can produce disproportionate consequences by raising insurance costs, deterring crews and shipowners, disrupting port access, and drawing third countries into the conflict. The objective is not necessarily to destroy large numbers of ships, but to make commercial maritime activity politically risky, operationally uncertain, and expensive to insure.

The Base++ trajectory

The current trajectory is best described as Base++: institutionalised maritime pressure with a growing risk of escalation into a wider grey-zone conflict.

It is not yet a full Worst-case scenario because there is no:

sustained collapse of maritime trade
generalised withdrawal of insurers
systematic naval escort regime
confirmed global campaign of Russian proxy attacks

Base++ means: the coercive instruments are active and becoming normalised, the institutional responses are partially formed but not yet consolidated, and the threshold for escalation is declining without having been crossed.

Transition indicators toward Worst-case

A transition toward Worst would be indicated by any of the following:

repeated European seizures and cargo confiscations of shadow fleet vessels
confirmed Russian transfer of maritime-drone capabilities to proxy actors
fatal attacks on neutral or EU-flagged vessels
expansion of war-risk exclusion zones beyond current parameters
direct Russian naval retaliation against European interdiction operations

These are not sequential — any single confirmed event could accelerate the others. The most consequential trigger is likely the transfer of maritime-drone capabilities: unlike direct Russian strikes, proxy technology transfer creates ambiguous attribution by design and is therefore harder to respond to with proportionate deterrence.

Why cheap maritime coercion is strategically effective

Commercial maritime activity is structurally vulnerable to distributed coercion because its key enabling systems — insurance underwriting, crew recruitment, port access, flag-state registration, satellite-based tracking — are each governed by different actors with different risk tolerances and no unified command authority.

A coercion campaign does not need to sink ships to succeed. It needs to:

Raise insurance premiums to the point where marginal voyages become uneconomic
Deter crew recruitment in third-country labour markets — Filipino, Indian, and Indonesian seafarers face personal risk that neither Russian nor Ukrainian governments indemnify
Create port access uncertainty that forces rerouting and delays
Draw third countries into the conflict as unwilling parties — flag states, insurers, classification societies, and port operators become strategic terrain

Each of these effects can be produced by a small number of ambiguous incidents. Attribution uncertainty is the mechanism: if it cannot be proven who attacked a vessel, the legal and political channels for proportionate response are blocked, while the commercial deterrence effect accumulates regardless.

This follows the same logic as distributed coercion in other domains: coercive power is distributed across commercial, legal, and logistical intermediaries who are not parties to the conflict but whose behaviour shapes its outcomes.

The civilian and commercial targeting problem

The central risk is therefore no longer only disruption of Russian exports. It is the normalisation and international spread of low-cost maritime coercion, where civilian shipping, third-country crews, insurers, ports, and commercial satellite systems become part of the strategic battlefield.

This creates a structural problem that distinguishes maritime grey-zone conflict from conventional military engagement:

Crew members are civilians from non-party states, with no military protection and limited legal recourse
Insurers are private commercial actors whose withdrawal decisions aggregate into a de facto maritime exclusion zone without requiring any state to declare one
Ports that accept shadow fleet vessels face secondary pressure; ports that refuse become instruments of a sanctions regime they may not have chosen
Commercial satellite operators providing navigational or tracking services face the same indispensability problem documented in the Starlink case: once their services become necessary infrastructure for maritime operations, decisions about access and continuity acquire sovereign significance

The Gulf of Aden case established that a non-state actor with limited industrial base could impose large costs on global trade through geographic chokepoint concentration. The European maritime case adds a layer: the coercion is directed not at a single chokepoint but at the distributed institutional architecture — insurance, flagging, crewing, port access — that makes commercial shipping possible anywhere.

The drone and proxy transfer dimension

The connection to drone warfare is direct. Ukrainian unmanned surface vessels (USVs) have established the operational viability of low-cost maritime autonomous systems for strikes against defended naval targets. The tactically relevant observation — consistent with adaptive coercive warfare research — is that the drone is not the full system. The full system includes sensor fusion, satellite connectivity, remote operation infrastructure, maintenance, and logistics.

Russian proxy transfer of maritime-drone capabilities would not require transferring a complete system. It would require transferring enough components, knowledge, and operational templates to enable a proxy actor to conduct ambiguous harassment operations against commercial traffic. The evidentiary and attribution burden then falls on the defender, not the attacker.

This is the maritime analogue of the supply-chain coercion documented in the drone warfare analysis: what matters strategically is not who manufactures the platform but who governs the enabling layers — frequencies, software, component supply, training templates, and operational doctrine.

The FCPI lens on maritime infrastructure

The commercial systems through which maritime activity is enabled are high-FCPI infrastructure by the standard criteria:

Finality centrality: shipping insurance, port access, and satellite tracking are necessary for the final delivery of physical goods
Dependency criticality: commercial actors cannot easily substitute these systems under coercive conditions
Systemic reach: disruption propagates to any industry dependent on maritime trade
Irreplaceability: the institutional architecture of Lloyd’s, flag-state registries, and GMDSS has no short-term alternative
Transition friction: rerouting, re-flagging, and insurance restructuring are possible over months and years, not days
Governance leverage: whoever can shape insurance underwriting decisions, flag-state compliance, or satellite access holds structural leverage over the entire system

The implication is that the most effective intervention points in a maritime coercion campaign are not the ships themselves but the institutional intermediaries: insurers, port authorities, classification societies, and satellite operators. These are the choke points through which coercive effects propagate.

Assessment

The shadow fleet problem and the maritime coercion trajectory are not analogous to previous Grey-zone conflicts in one important respect: the intermediaries under pressure — insurance markets, port operators, flag-state registries — are deeply institutionalised, internationally connected, and embedded in global commercial law. Their responses will not be ad hoc. They will produce lasting structural changes to how maritime risk is priced, attributed, and governed.

The normalisation of maritime coercion is therefore not just a tactical problem for navies. It is an institutional problem for the commercial and legal architecture that underpins global trade. That architecture is indispensable in the precise sense the FCPI framework defines: its disruption produces consequences that cannot be reversed quickly, and its governance is distributed across actors with different jurisdictions, mandates, and risk tolerances.

The Base++ scenario is stable in the short term precisely because that institutional architecture absorbs coercive pressure without collapsing. The transition to Worst occurs when the absorption capacity is exceeded — when premiums make entire trade routes uneconomic, when crews are unwilling to serve, or when proxy actors establish that attribution can be made permanently ambiguous.

Cheap Coercion Changes Power Before It Changes Law
What Is Distributed Coercion
The Gulf as an Early Theatre for Distributed Coercion Risk
Drone Armies to Systems States — maritime drone systems in the adaptive coercive warfare framework
Starlink vs Starshield — the satellite connectivity layer as coercive infrastructure
FCPI Index — measuring indispensability of maritime enabling systems

Cheap Coercion Changes Power The Gulf as Early Theatre Drone Armies to Systems States