Could Russia follow the ‘Hormuz playbook’ in the Baltic and Black seas?

On the eve of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, 56 tankers sailed through the Strait of Hormuz. Two days later, Lloyd’s List, the maritime industry’s journal of record, counted just seven tankers and a single gas carrier — all small and three of them shadow-fleet vessels — with hundreds more drifting in the Gulf of Oman. One of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints had not been mined, blockaded, or seized by a navy. Rather, it had been priced shut by a handful of drone strikes and the insurance market.

Within two days of the first U.S.-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28, major marine war-risk insurers terminated existing cover and repriced sharply upward. Tanker traffic collapsed by more than 80 percent before Iran laid a single mine. Two months on, the strait remains effectively closed. Iran briefly declared it open on April 17; within 24 hours, it shut it again. A U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports has created a dual blockade — Iran blocking the Gulf, the United States blocking Iran. Daily transits remain in single digits. Shipowners say a return to normal is months away.

By effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has demonstrated that a chokepoint vital for global trade can be closed with drone attacks, insurance repricing, and the self-interested logic of shipping companies. The lesson for Europe is immediate: Russia could employ the same mechanism to close key maritime chokepoints at the Danish or Turkish Straits.

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