Gwynne Dyer is a British Canadian journalist and longtime commentator on international affairs.

OPINION: It’s easy to imagine Vladimir Putin entering the store marked “Sweden”, accidentally smashing some fine crockery by mistake and growling: “Nice little shop you have here. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

But Sweden is not a ceramics shop, Putin is not a mafia-capo, and what is happening in the Baltic Sea now is not a protective racket.

The Russian president has branded both Finland and Sweden, two neutral countries for a long time (almost eighty years for Finland, over two hundred for Sweden), to join the NATO alliance, the very “threat” that Putin claimed he was trying to drive away. from Russia’s borders.

Finland has a 1300 km long border with northern Russia.

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The Swedish and Finnish response to his invasion of Ukraine would have surprised Putin.

He would see no connection between his invasion of Ukraine, a former Russian imperialist possession that needed to be whipped back in line, and two independent countries that have not been in Russia’s sphere of influence for over a century.

They, on the other hand, saw a connection.

A neighbor whom they previously judged to be dangerous but rational had suddenly turned out to be an aggressive and probably irrational player.

No fully sensible and competent Russian ruler would have attacked Ukraine with the insufficient forces and the random, arrogant strategy used by Putin.

One might think that Putin’s pure incompetence would be reassuring for Swedes and Finns, but it was not.

On the contrary, it frightens them, because they are very much in the same position as Ukraine militarily: relatively small countries (Sweden has ten million people, Finland five million) with very good military forces.

I can personally attest to this, because in connection with making a documentary about neutrality, I spent time at sea in the Baltic Sea with Swedish fast attack boats out of Karlskrona, and with Finnish reservists on exercises between Lappeenranta and the Russian border.

With a little practice and close-up, you can see which military is the real deal and which are just chocolate soldiers.

These were people who knew what they were doing and did it with quiet efficiency. They would give a very good account of themselves if their countries were ever invaded.

They may even be able to stop the Russians’ deaths (and no one else is able to invade them).

That is why the Swedes chose neutrality: they thought they were safer that way.

If there was a general war, they were not a strategically important place and they would be very costly to invade, so perhaps the great combatants would leave them alone.

The Finns were forced into neutrality by the Soviet Union after World War II. They lost a lot of territory to the Russians, but they fought hard enough for Moscow to keep them neutral rather than reduce them to satellite status.

So why have both countries now decided to join NATO? They are still so tough nuts to crack that they could probably stop the Russians themselves if Moscow were also involved in a war with NATO.

And why would the Russians just attack them alone? Stay neutral, and even in the worst case, the Russians will probably walk past you.

It remained a valid assessment until February 24, 2022, and then suddenly it was not.

Putin invaded Ukraine, probably even to the astonishment of his own entourage, and from the outset began issuing veiled warnings to resort to nuclear weapons should he be annihilated.

The Russian attack on Ukraine came to an end almost immediately, which it had to do unless the Ukrainian army was completely useless. Too few Russian troops, too many lines of attack.

And Moscow’s tips on resorting to nuclear weapons to compensate for a conventional defeat multiplied.

This is crazy stuff, and all the military expertise and hardware that the Baltic countries can absorb in a conventional war would be irrelevant if they themselves were faced with similar Russian nuclear threats.

The only effective antidote to a nuclear threat is a credible promise of nuclear retaliation.

Sweden and Finland have no nuclear weapons, and the only way they can have their security guaranteed by a nuclear deterrent is to join NATO. So that’s what they do.

Swedes still do not like nuclear weapons and Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson emphasized that Sweden will not allow foreign troops or nuclear weapons to be based in the country, but the deal is done.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is demanding that the two Baltic states expel some anti-Turkish Kurdish activists as a reward for not vetoing this NATO expansion, but this problem will be honed.

It will take months to do the legal work, but in practice the two Baltic countries are already covered by NATO’s nuclear guarantee.