Russian Collateral Damage: Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO
Finland’s and Sweden’s expected accession to NATO is the biggest collateral damage that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has incurred so far.
Finland’s move to join NATO earlier this year may have come as a surprise to much of the world, but Finns had been discussing joining for years. In 2016, the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned one Report on the potential effects of NATO membership (I was one of the report’s four authors). One of the three key points of this report has been proven false: the question of NATO accession has not been put to a referendum. There was no need to give the voters a say, as recent events had made accession widely popular among Finns.
However, the other two takeaways correctly predicted that Finland would join NATO at the same time as Sweden, and that the main threat to the country’s security – its unstable, unpredictable and nuclear-armed neighbor Russia – was here to stay. Now Finland will face that threat with the rest of the alliance rather than alone.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Finns had calculated that EU membership would keep them safe, unlike the Swedes who saw the EU as a mere trading partner. When Finland’s national security strategy in 2004 first acknowledged the prospect of NATO membership, many dismissed the idea as divorced from reality.
However, Finland’s so-called NATO alternative turned out to be more than just a slogan and became proof of the Finns’ characteristic pragmatism. Because while the Swedes’ long-standing refusal to join the alliance had to do with their national identity, for the Finns neutrality was never more than a necessity, an act of survival.
Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Finns thought it was enough to work closely with NATO, integrate militarily with Sweden, and cooperate with the United States and Great Britain. It seemed obvious that accession would cause a breach with Russia, which the Finns tried to avoid at all costs.
In the end, it was Russia that chose to break, and not only with Finland, but with all of Europe and the Western world. In a twist the Kremlin apparently did not expect, Finland and Sweden’s debates over NATO membership were changed by the war and the accompanying belligerent rhetoric from Russia’s leaders, particularly President Vladimir Putin.
Finns were reminded of the events of 1939, when the Soviet Union denied their country’s right to exist and attacked it in the Winter War. More than eighty years later, Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine did far more to influence public opinion in Finland and Sweden than its questioning of their right to join NATO.
It is true that Finland had already begun to prepare for a potential confrontation with its neighbor to the east. During the Cold War, the Norwegian political scientist Arne Olav Brundtland described Finland’s defense strategy as “protection from aid”, referring to the Soviet-Finnish Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance.
Thanks to continuous efforts to increase Finland’s defense potential, the country today has the strongest military in Northern Europe. Finns are still required to complete military service, a system that remains popular and the armed forces’ main source of recruits for the officer corps. The army also has a large pool of reservists, who train regularly.
Finland’s long-standing military traditions are another factor. Unlike Sweden or Germany, the country has never swung from territorial defense to expeditionary warfare, the advisability of which the Finnish military has always considered in relation to whether it would help protect the homeland.
The Finnish Army’s artillery units are the largest in Europe: a legacy of the Second World War and a nod to the Stalinist maxim that artillery is the “god of war”. Finnish military engineers are first-class specialists in traps, mining, obstacles and defensive equipment. On the aviation front, once the Finnish Air Force replaces its F-18 fleet with sixty-four F-35s, the combined air force of the northern European states—including Norway and Denmark’s F-35s and Sweden’s Saab JAS 39 Gripen—will more than compete with Russian Air Force assets in the north.
Every arm of the Finnish military has missile capabilities, from the Air Force’s JASSM air-to-surface cruise missiles, which are exclusive to Finland and Australia, to the Navy’s Israeli-made Gabriel V low-altitude anti-ship missiles, and the Army’s track-mounted GMLRS system, which is better more suitable for Finnish terrain than, for example, the wheel-mounted HIMARS.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has not been without mistakes. Yet the biggest has been underestimating Ukraine’s willingness and ability to fight and the collective West’s willingness to support Ukrainians, including by supplying them with lethal weapons.
Seen in this light, Finland’s and Sweden’s accession to NATO is less a direct threat to Russia and more collateral damage. After all, Sweden received informal security guarantees from the US already in the 1950s, Finland has long cooperated with the alliance and both countries’ militaries adhere to NATO standards. Little will change for northern Europe militarily, except that Norway will now have an easier time defending the northern province of Finnmark.
Strategically, for Russia, the coast off Murmansk where nuclear combat forces are stationed will continue to take precedence over the Baltic Sea, despite the latter’s importance for transport routes connecting St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad. Hence, in part, the tendency of the Russian media – especially pro-Kremlin talk shows – to play down the news about Finland and Sweden’s upcoming entry into NATO. Even the recently hawkish former president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, while visiting the Russian north in late July, chose not to make a fuss about the matter, instead repeating the Kremlin’s warning that “Finland and Sweden’s decision joining NATO is a serious mistake to which Russia will give a symmetrical response.”
Nevertheless, a glance at a map is enough to understand that in the longer term the accession of two northern states to the alliance will bring serious political and psychological consequences for Moscow, although the exact form these consequences will take is not yet clear.
Russia’s long border with Finland stretches over 1,300 kilometers, a corridor of wooded and sparsely populated land from Murmansk to St. Petersburg. How Moscow plans to defend it remains to be seen. At the moment, the units guarding it are being rapidly redeployed to fight – and in many cases to die – in Ukraine.
The once fearsome Russian army’s heavy losses in Ukraine have exposed its true condition. With Ukrainians unwilling to surrender and Putin unwilling to retreat, the war will be settled on the battlefield. It will shape Russia’s destiny above all else. After all, the real tsars are victorious, while the vanquished are mere pretenders.
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