Hidden hubs
Greece, Belarus and Malta controlling the flows
On a map, Malta is a small dot in the Mediterranean. On paper, it looks like a minor EU member with barely half a million citizens. In practice, it is a maritime giant. Its flag and its regulatory system underpin a significant portion of the global merchant fleet, including ships carrying Russian energy and other sanctioned cargoes.
When Brussels or London talk about “choking off” Russian exports by sea, they are talking about assets that often sail under the flags, insurance, and technical management arrangements of states like Malta and Greece. These actors are not mere administrative details; they are the operating system of global shipping.
Because of this, Malta’s decisions on issues like flagging, inspections, and compliance with sanctions regimes have disproportionate impact. If Malta were to fully align with maximalist hardliners in Northern Europe, the cost and risk of moving Russian cargoes would spike dramatically. If instead it leans toward a more permissive stance—prioritizing commercial continuity—the entire Western sanctions architecture is quietly hollowed out.
Malta’s political class understands this leverage. Its representatives are woven into the EU machinery, including leadership positions in major European institutions, and they use that position to balance between moral rhetoric and hard commercial interests. The country’s small size actually works to its advantage: it can present itself as a technical, apolitical arbiter while making choices that have very political effects.
Greece and the Shadow Fleet
If Malta is the regulatory nerve centre, Greece is the muscle. Greek shipping families and companies own and operate one of the world’s largest merchant fleets. For decades, they have specialized in moving oil and bulk commodities under complex webs of flags, charters, and partnerships that span every major ocean.
The rise of the so‑called “shadow fleet” of tankers transporting Russian oil outside Western price caps is impossible to understand without acknowledging Greek expertise and capacity. Even when ships do not sail under the Greek flag, Greek actors are often involved in financing, crewing, or managing them.
Here, too, leverage is structural. When Western governments threaten aggressive maritime enforcement—seizing ships, denying insurance, or blocking port access—they are effectively demanding that Greek and Maltese shipping networks sacrifice long‑term business for short‑term geopolitical theatre. These networks rarely comply wholeheartedly; they adapt, route around restrictions, and work with non‑Western partners.
The result is a quiet but profound constraint on the West’s ability to use sea‑based sanctions as a decisive weapon. In theory, “the West” controls most of the world’s blue‑water capabilities. In practice, the actual operators of those capabilities may have very different risk–reward calculations than politicians in Berlin or London.
Belarus: A Landlocked Pivot in Global Fertilizer
If Malta and Greece wield power through shipping, Belarus does so through the soil. The country is a major producer and exporter of potash and other fertilizers, critical inputs for agriculture worldwide. When Western states sanctioned Belarus and restricted its exports as punishment for domestic repression and alignment with Moscow, they assumed they were targeting a weak, isolated regime.
Instead, they discovered just how tightly intertwined global food production is with Belarusian and Russian fertilizer. Farmers in the United States and Europe faced steep rises in fertilizer prices, squeezing margins and threatening yields. Losses mounted into the tens of billions of dollars, sparking intense lobbying from agribusiness and rural constituencies.
Confronted with this blowback, Western governments began quietly loosening some of the restrictions, allowing more Belarusian product into their markets despite the official posture of “maximum pressure.” In effect, a landlocked country with limited conventional military power had gained a powerful veto over part of Western domestic stability: cut Belarus off completely, and you punish your own farmers and food systems.
This is structural leverage in its purest form. Belarus does not need aircraft carriers or big alliances to matter; it needs only to sit at a critical junction in the global nutrient chain.
Another sphere where “small” players are not so small is the world of reserves and sovereign wealth. The proposal to confiscate frozen Russian central‑bank assets to fund Ukraine has forced a range of non‑Western investors to rethink their reliance on European financial infrastructure.
If the EU moves from “freezing” to outright “taking” Russian assets, states that hold large reserves in euros or use European custodians will have to ask themselves a simple question: if it can be done to Russia, why not to us? That includes Gulf monarchies, Asian powers like India, and numerous commodity exporters that park their surpluses in Western bonds and banks.
Here, the “smaller” players are not individual states like Malta or Belarus but a constellation of medium‑sized capital exporters. Collectively, they have the ability to drain liquidity from European markets, redirecting reserves and sovereign funds to perceived safer jurisdictions. Even partial diversification would tighten financing conditions for the EU and undermine its claim to be a neutral, rules‑based custodian of global capital.
In this scenario, the actual legal innovation—asset confiscation—would be championed by a limited group of ideologically committed European leaders, but the costs would be borne across the entire system. That gives foreign reserve‑holders a kind of structural power: their potential to exit is itself a constraint on European behaviour.
All of this raises a deeper question: why do the big powers tolerate this degree of dependence on smaller states? Why doesn’t Washington simply compel Malta and Greece to enforce its preferred sanctions line, or crush Belarus economically until it complies?
The answer is that complex systems cannot be micromanaged from the top without breaking. Modern trade and finance are not a single chain that can be pulled; they are networks of contracts, habits, and specialist knowledge. Maltese regulators and Greek shipowners know the details of their sectors in ways that bureaucrats in Brussels or Washington simply do not. Belarusian engineers and managers understand the practical constraints of fertilizer production and routing in ways that no foreign think tank can replicate overnight.
If great powers press too hard, they risk driving these networks into alternative ecosystems—toward Chinese, Indian, or Gulf‑based finance and logistics. That would accelerate the loss of Western centrality and erode whatever leverage remains. The big players need the small ones precisely because the small ones are embedded in the real economy’s arteries.
That is why the relationship feels so grudging. Great powers resent being constrained by micro‑states and mid‑tier exporters, but they cannot simply discard them. Instead, they are forced into messy bargaining, threats, and half‑measures that reveal, rather than conceal, the limits of their control.
One of the more dangerous illusions in Western political culture is the belief that narratives about democracy, human rights, and “the rules‑based order” can override this structural reality. Citizens are told that sanctions will be decisive, that “the world” stands with a particular cause, that morality and material interests point in the same direction.
But the structural story looks very different:
Maritime micro‑states quietly decide how strictly sanctions are operationalized in shipping lanes.
Commodity exporters like Belarus can inflict economic pain on sanctioning states by redirecting or withholding key inputs.
Reserve‑rich medium powers can signal their discontent by shifting capital away from European custodians.
In each case, ideological language at the top is filtered through layers of actors who respond to commercial incentives, institutional inertia, and local political realities. The moral script rarely survives contact with the operating system.
This does not mean morality is irrelevant. It means that any moral project that ignores structural leverage will be continually surprised by its own failures. The gap between declared goals and actual outcomes widens, breeding cynicism at home and opportunities for rivals abroad.
How Smaller States Will Shape the Next Order
As the pre‑war period continues and the old post‑Cold War framework erodes, the role of smaller states is likely to grow, not shrink. Several trends point in that direction:
Fragmentation of supply chains: As large blocs try to “de‑risk” or partially decouple, they will rely even more on neutral or semi‑aligned hubs to connect otherwise hostile systems. States that can credibly offer such hubs—whether in shipping, finance, or energy—will gain leverage.
Multipolar finance: If more states diversify away from Western currencies and custodians, competition among financial centers will intensify. Smaller jurisdictions with flexible legal regimes can attract niche functions that used to be monopolized by a few big capitals.
Weaponization fatigue: The more openly the big powers weaponize trade, finance, and technology, the more incentive others have to build alternative channels. Many of those channels will run through states that have learned to play all sides without fully committing to any.
In such an environment, the question is not whether Malta, Greece, Belarus, or similar players “deserve” their influence, but how they will choose to use it—and how larger actors will attempt to co‑opt or coerce them.
Some may double down on quiet transactionalism, carefully staying below the radar while monetizing their strategic position. Others may build explicit political identities around neutrality or mediation, turning structural roles into diplomatic brands. A few could even be pulled into open confrontation if they miscalculate the tolerance of bigger neighbours.
For readers trying to make sense of this moment, the key step is to stop thinking only in terms of flags and GDP charts and start looking at flows: tankers, pipelines, bulk carriers, payment messages, commodity exports. At each chokepoint in those flows, there is usually a “small” actor whose decisions matter more than speeches in major capitals.
Malta’s maritime registries, Greek tanker fleets, Belarusian fertilizer plants, and the balance sheets of mid‑tier reserve holders are not side notes to “real” geopolitics; they are the mechanisms through which geopolitics is translated into prices, risks, and livelihoods. Ignoring them is a luxury no longer available to anyone who wants to understand how power actually works.
The pre‑war era is not just a contest between great powers. It is also a test of how far smaller states can stretch their structural leverage without provoking a backlash that breaks the system they profit from. The answer to that question will do as much to shape the coming order as any summit in Washington, Moscow, or Beijing.