Putin’s war strikes back when Finland, Sweden try to join NATO
USIP’s A. Wess Mitchell explores the implications of NATO’s expansion for the war in Ukraine, Putin’s potential response and what it means for security architecture and geopolitics in Europe.
What are the short-term consequences of NATO’s expansion, specifically for the war in Ukraine? Can it prolong the war or force Putin to take desperate measures, such as distributing weapons of mass destruction?
Finland’s and Sweden’s decision to apply for NATO membership shows the unintended consequences for Putin of his war in Ukraine. While his immediate goal was to defeat and subjugate Ukraine, he also wanted to create a kind of demonstration effect of Russian strength and, as the Russian diplomatic note clarified the pre-war period, push back NATO from Russia’s borders. The war has achieved just the opposite. Russia will now have even more NATO presence at its borders, both through the addition of hundreds of miles of NATO territory to the Russian border, and through the deployment of Western troop presence in Central Europe. So the war is hitting Putin back, not only militarily but also geopolitically.
The immediate implication is that Putin will need to pay military attention to Russia’s northwestern flank at a time when he needs all the firepower he can muster for the conflict in Ukraine. Instead of prolonging the war, if anything, NATO’s Nordic expansion could shorten it by increasing military demands on Russia. Politically, it could increase Putin’s pressure from within the Russian elite to change course, as it is another illustration, alongside the effects of sanctions and losses in the war itself, of the cost of his aggressive foreign policy. Remember that Putin’s central value proposition, and the key to his legitimacy in the eyes of the Russian elite, is his claim to military competence – especially the ability to rebuild Russian power and prestige through the effective use of the military. If the war reveals it as a fiction, as it does now, and also accumulates sufficient geopolitical, economic and political costs along the way, then Putin’s value proposition as a leader is seriously eroded in Kremlin circles, and even among the Russian people.
Apart from immediate measures and threats (eg shutting down the energy supply to Finland, Putin’s threat of a “technical military” response), how do you expect Putin to respond if Finland and Sweden formally join NATO?
Putin’s dilemma is that he must respond in some way to the movements of Finland and Sweden to avoid appearing weak, but he has few obvious or effective response options. For several years he has threatened both countries to join NATO would lead to negative consequences, so he can not afford not to respond in any way. The simplest answer is to reduce energy exports, as he has done. But both countries can diversify their energy sources without putting too much strain on their economies. Militarily, Putin’s usual response would be to send conventional Russian forces to the border with Finland and to deploy Russian aircraft and ships to the eastern Baltic. But he needs all the military power he can get in Ukraine.
So Putin’s most likely response will be to deploy missiles to the border with Finland and Kaliningrad. Russia has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons, including many low-yield or tactical nuclear weapons. Putin is likely to deploy such weapons in a way that is in line with Finnish and Swedish fears that joining NATO will trigger an aggressive Russian response. He is aware that there are strong pacifist traditions in both countries. In the past, it could have had the desired effect of driving up the dynamics of aggressive measures to create pressure on Finnish and Swedish governments. But doing so now will probably only increase Finnish and Swedish support for NATO membership, given what they have seen happen in Ukraine. That’s what war does – it creates fear, and fear leads to peaceful nations seeking security through alliances.
How would Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO accession affect Europe’s geopolitics? Would it ultimately increase European security?
The United States should always be wise when it comes to adding new treaty allies – it’s really a serious thing to expand the United States’ global defensive scope. In the case of Finland and Sweden, I see the effect as positive; their accession will round off NATO geographically and improve Europe’s defensiveness in a crisis. We must be clear that both Sweden and Finland will need to increase defense spending, together with the rest of Europe. But both have serious, professional military with specialized capabilities and extensive experience of partnering with NATO. Finland has a serious defensive capability, including one of the largest artillery forces in Europe, and nationwide participation in reserves such as the Swiss or Israeli model. Their long border with Russia is dotted with thousands of lakes and is very defensible, as we saw during the Winter War of the 1930s. Sweden adds significant naval and especially anti-submarine capability.
However, the main positive is geographical and strategic in nature – bringing these states into NATO will significantly alleviate the Alliance’s greatest military vulnerability, which is the exposed geography of the Baltic states. If you look at a map, the Baltic states form an exposed prominent place in the northeast corner of the alliance. It would probably be difficult to get reinforcements for them in a crisis. Adding Finland and Sweden to NATO alleviates that vulnerability and makes the Baltic states a much less inviting target. It complicates the Russian theory of victory in the Baltic Sea, which has focused on creating one fait accompli by grabbing a strip of territory and then waiting for NATO to try to get enough troops into the region to evict them. Adding Finland and Sweden to NATO makes the Baltics less isolated, more defensible and easier to support in a crisis, which in turn probably makes Russia less likely to attack them in the first place and therefore makes war less likely.
NATO membership also removes some unhelpful ambiguity about Finland and Sweden themselves. We saw in 1914 with Belgium how ambiguity about whether and how to defend a neutral can increase the calculation of war on the part of an attacker. Before joining NATO, how to respond if Russia attacked one of these two states would have been a difficult question for the United States. This very ambiguity could invite the war we want to avoid. NATO membership removes that ambiguity. It also allows us to incorporate Finland and Sweden into NATO’s contingency planning.
Adding these two countries to NATO is also good from the perspective of the US global strategy. Washington must see Europe not in isolation but with the reality of US commitments in the Indo-Pacific. It is in America’s interest that Europe be as defensible, uninviting to aggression and defensively capable as possible to ensure stability in Asia as well. In my opinion, it contributes to this goal to add serious, security-oriented actors such as Finland and Sweden to NATO, together with following up on the increased defense commitments that the war has caused.
A. Wess Mitchell is a senior adviser to the Center for Russia and Europe at USIP.