Morning World: Why Finland joining NATO is a nightmare for Putin

Sanna Marin’s time as Finland’s Prime Minister may be coming to an end, but the 37-year-old leader has presided over a pivotal moment in her country’s history.

On Tuesday, Finland joined NATO, doubling the alliance’s land border with Russia. It’s the precise opposite of what Vladimir Putin wanted to happen when he invaded Ukraine last year, and a tectonic shift in the balance of power in the Baltic Sea.

Russia’s strategy since Napoleonic times has been to menace Finland and stop it from joining hostile military alliances. In a matter of months, centuries of careful Russian foreign policy and diplomacy have come crashing down.

Long shadow

In Finland, the Ukraine War has summoned ghosts of the past. Finland declared independence from Russia during the chaos of the Russian Revolution in 1917, but after being invaded and defeated by the Soviet Union in the Second World War, Finland was forced to give up 10% of its territory and pay reparations to its mighty neighbour.

The decades of official neutrality that followed stemmed from a condition of peace imposed by the Soviets in 1948, seen in Finland as a pragmatic way of avoiding confrontation.

Finns, then, are acutely aware that their 823-mile border with Russia would be difficult to defend in the event of an attack. Popular support for joining NATO, which hovered between 20 and 25 per cent for years before Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has reached 76 per cent.

Baltic threat

NATO’s military planners have fretted for years about how to protect its three Baltic members – Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia – which border Russia on the alliance’s vulnerable north-eastern flank.

One major source of concern is the Suwalki Gap, a 90km corridor between Belarus in the East and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad in the West. A lighting strike by Russian forces to link the two territories would sever NATO’s Baltic states from the unbroken chain running from Estonia to Turkey.

Until now, NATO has been heavily outnumbered by Russian troops in the North. Bringing Finland into the fold changes the equation.

NATO now has full access to Finnish military bases and airstrips. Finland’s artillery forces are the largest and best-equipped in Western Europe, with more firepower than Poland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden combined.

Finland also boasts highly capable armed forces with expertise in Arctic warfare. The trauma of the Soviet invasion of 1939 meant that while other Western European militaries scaled back after the Cold War, Finland stuck to a conscription model. It has a wartime troop strength of up to 280,000 and a total reserve in theory of 870,000.

View from Moscow

It’s worth looking at NATO’s expansion from a Russian perspective.

That NATO has no desire to invade Russia is, in a sense, irrelevant; at the level of military strategy, intentions play second fiddle to capabilities, and Finland now poses a serious strategic problem for the Kremlin.

The Finnish border is just 400km from Russia’s old imperial capital, St. Petersburg. On its own, Finland isn’t capable of threatening the city. As part of NATO, it is.

And near the Norwegian border in the Russian far North is Murmansk, home to its Northern Fleet, and the lion’s share of its nuclear submarines and strategic bombers.

Murmansk is supplied by a single twin highway and rail corridor called the R21, which runs north from St. Petersburg parallel to the Finnish border through hundreds of kilometres of isolated forest.

Finnish special forces sabotaging the route and cutting off Russia’s nuclear deterrent in the event of a NATO-Russia conflict is now a real possibility.

With the war in Ukraine locked in a bitter stalemate, Putin’s strategic headache in the North – one entirely of his own making – is the last thing he needs.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life