As tensions in Ukraine grow, Sweden shows its military strength on the strategic island in the Baltic Sea
Rutger Bandholtz, who commanded a battery of three 120 mm Bofor cannons that guarded Slite, the island’s eastern harbor, remembers the last time the island saw tensions similar to those today.
A Soviet submarine ran aground off Sweden’s largest naval base in Karlskrona in 1981 and Sweden feared that the Soviet Union would send in warships to rescue it.
“It was the only time we had sharp ammunition in our cannons,” Bandholtz recalls when he shows me one of the Bofors pistols at the museum. “The Prime Minister said, ‘Hold the line,’ and we did. They did not cross it, because they realized that our weapons were loaded.”
In 2005, the Gotland regiment was disbanded, due to, Mr Winnerstig snorts, to “the end of the Cold War, eternal peace and the end of history”.
All the Coast Guard is gone. The armed forces even sold the submarine on the north coast to a local businessman, only to buy it back in 2018 after it was first almost sold to a Russian oligarch and then sold to a businessman in Hong Kong.
Demilitarization was reversed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, but four years after Gotland’s regiment was re-established, it still has only 300 employees.
“It is quite easy to dismantle a military establishment and military capabilities. It takes quite a long time to rebuild it,” explains Mattias Ardin, the regiment’s commander on Gotland. “We started almost from scratch and we have had to rebuild all the buildings, and you can not take in many people when you have nowhere to train them.”
But he says that in recent weeks Sweden has shown that it can strengthen the island, with infantry patrols and tanks that are very visible on the streets.
– There has been a significant strengthening of Gotland and we have seen some of those abilities here today, he says.