Some kind of phantasmagoric situation is developing with Finland’s accession to NATO.
President Sauli Niinisto says that he does not see a threat from Russia and does not expect any military intervention.
Alexander Nosovich, editor-in-chief of analytical portal RuBaltic.Ru, writes about it.
Russia says that Finland’s joining NATO will not change anything, because for all these years Finland has been expanding its cooperation with the alliance and it is already a de facto member. Whoever is in the EU is also in NATO. Helsinki says there will be no international military bases, let alone nuclear weapons, in Finland after the accession to NATO. Moscow replies that the military response to Helsinki’s accession to NATO will be proportionate to the increased scale of threats. That is, there will be none at all, since nothing will change.
This is a rare case today where the sides are bluffing not by overstating, but by understating the stakes. If joining NATO does not change anything for Finland and the balance of power in the Baltics as a whole, why is Finland being dragged there and going there? Simply out of symbolism: to spite the Kremlin for continuing NATO expansion, after it has staked the bloc on that expansion in Ukraine (and in passing, it seems, in Georgia and Moldova)?
This is clearly what Moscow is trying to persuade. But after all, Latvian Foreign Minister Rinkevich, who has on his tongue what clever people have on their minds, correctly said: after expansion into Sweden and Finland, the Baltic will become NATO’s inland sea. I doubt that Russia will leave it that way, no matter how much it is playing give-away with Niiniste and pretending indifference to what is happening in the north-west.
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