The points used to define the Straight Baselines along the Russian coast are
found in the following source document:
The USSR, Eastern Europe and the development of the law of the sea.
C. The Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone.
C3. Soviet Legislation on Straight Baselines.
(Release 87-1, Issued September 1987).
The baseline is either defined as a straight line between points, or 'Along
lowest tide'. Although the baseline points may deviate somewhat from the
coastline databases included in INSROP GIS, these points are kept as defined by their
coordinates, and not moved to fit with the coastline databases.
The line segments defined as 'Along lowest tide' were generated as follows:
1. Using sea charts and the coastline from the Digital Chart of the World
(1:1,000,000), the areas where the lowtide line deviated significantly from the
coastline were digitized onscreen and integrated into the database.
2. The remaining line segments defined as 'Along lowest tide' were
approximeted by using the coastlines from the Digital Chart of the World (1:1,000,000) and
the World Vector Shoreline (1:250,000). The line segments were modified by
adding and moving line vertices interactively using the ArcView editing functions.
In places where these coastlines deviated, the one best fitting to the
baseline points and the digitized lowtide lines were used.
3. A few short line segments defined as 'Along lowest tide' off the coast
without being digitized as a lowtide line remains as straight lines.
Comment:
U.S. protest to Russian Baselines:
The U.S. has forwarded multiple protests to parts of the Russian straight
baselines established in the Arctic under the Decree of 15 January, l985, including
the Russian Arctic straits which the U.S. considers international, (Roach, J.
Ashley, and Robert W. Smith, International Law Studies - 1994 - Excessive
Maritime claims, Vol 66, Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, pp. 48, 58 and
200-207). In addition to the surface craft employed in asserting part of these
claims, submarines may also have been used in the U.S. program Freedom of
Navigation (FON), (Conversation Douglas Brubaker with Captain Dennis Mandsager, JAGC,
U.S. Navy, Staff Judge Advocate, USCINCPAC (JO6) Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii, USA
at the Russian American Seminar on the Law of the Sea, Moscow, August 23-26,
l994).
Path: <NSR_DATA>\poliadmi\baseline
GeoDataset type: Shapefile with PolyLine features.
Coordinate system: Latitude/longitude in decimal degrees
* Baselines
424 PolyLines, 2 descriptive fields.
Fields: [<Name>] -- <Alias> (type of field)
[No] -- "No" (Numeric, no decimals)
[Type] -- "Baseline type" (Numeric, no decimals)
Baselines