The authorities of the Russian Federation unilaterally decided to change the maritime borders of the country with Lithuania and Finland in the Baltic Sea.
The relevant project of the resolution is published on the portal of legal acts, reports The Moscow Time.
According to the document prepared by the Russian Ministry of Defense, Russia intends to declare part of the water area in the east of the Gulf of Finland, as well as near the cities of Baltiysk and Zelenogradsk in the Kaliningrad region, as its internal sea waters.
For this purpose, the geographic coordinates of the points that determine the position of the starting lines from which the width of the territorial sea of the Russian Federation, as well as the adjacent zone near the coast and islands are measured, will be changed.
On the border with Finland, the government of the Russian Federation wants to adjust the coordinates in the area of the islands of Yahi, Sommers, Holland, Rodscher, Maly Tuters, Vigrund, as well as near the northern entrance cape of the Narva River.
On the border with Lithuania, the area of the Curonian Spit in the Gulf of Gdańsk, the areas of Cape Taran, the cape south of Cape Taran, and the Baltic Spit came under review.
The authors of the project explain their decision by the fact that the current borders "do not fully correspond to the modern geographical situation." According to them, the points were recorded "according to small-scale marine navigation maps", which, for their part, are based on works of the middle of the 20th century, and this "does not make it possible to determine the outer limit of the internal sea waters" of the Russian Federation.