NATO gaining all-important foothold at Russia's doorstep Finland adds new might to the alliance

Last week Finland joined NATO. This event has much more significance for the security of modern Russia than hypothetical Ukraine's accession to the alliance. The dividing barrier in the north has disappeared between Russia and the global West. However, the Kremlin insists that Finland's accession to NATO will be of little importance. However, Finland is moving to the forefront of the confrontation with Russia even without being bound to NATO.

NATO's Eastern European future

On the face of it, Finland's formal NATO membership looks like a major success for the West. It has inherited a well-developed, small (some 22,000 soldiers) but well-trained army since Finland has been spending more than 2% of GDP on military expenditure since 20121, more than many members of the alliance.

More importantly, NATO will be able to set its camp in military infrastructure built by the Finns along hundreds of kilometres of the Russian border in an area of strategic importance for the Russian Federation. Firstly, it is the outskirts of St. Petersburg, the second Russian capital. Secondly, it is as close as possible to the key deployment areas of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces (SMART) in north-western Russia. With such a push toward the locations of the Strategic Missile Forces, NATO's chances of confronting Russian nuclear forces in general and protecting America from Russian missiles, in particular, would increase significantly. Russian missile fighters had planned to launch missiles toward the US through the North Pole, and the Strategic Missile Forces' leaning toward northern regions is connected with it. Moving them further away from the Finnish border would not be possible, not only because of the climate but also because of the lack of communications and all life there - even if the missiles were moved there they would prove to be visible and vulnerable.

However, NATO's recent achievements in connection with Finland's accession have little to do with current events. They were already a fait accompli long before 2023 and even 2014. Finland remained neutral for decades, but after the end of the Cold War began to draw closer to NATO. For a long time, Russia responded only by further demilitarizing its northern borders. Primakov's "pivots over the Atlantic" as well as Putin's "Munich speeches" remained mostly rhetoric.

And Helsinki, though the Russian Federation was weakening, continued to focus on maintaining the army's fighting ability and the military training of the population - in these respects it has always been the leader in Europe. Finns not only joined the Partnership for Peace in 1994 but also adopted NATO standards and took part in alliance summits, meetings, exercises and wars. Already by the early 2000s, Finnish neutrality started to look questionable. In 2014, Finland and Sweden signed a military assistance treaty with NATO and militarily and politically bound themselves to the bloc for good. The Kremlin lost and the West won then, not now. Today's celebrations on the occasion of Finland's admission to the alliance look more like a substitute for victories in the war with Russia in Ukraine.

But there is another point: if the current trends in European security, epitomised by Finland's accession to NATO, continue, the global West runs the risk of facing a number of dangers. First, the alliance is rapidly shifting its centre of gravity towards Eastern Europe. It is precisely gravity, not activity - it is clear that during the Cold War, NATO had its eye on Eastern Europe and it is now beginning to lean on it, although leaning on it is more than problematic. The decision to admit Eastern European states was once heralded as a triumph for democracy and Euro-Atlanticism, but the situation looks ambiguous for the West, as it entails a risky metamorphosis in the very foundations of NATO. After all, the alliance was created and worked successfully as a bloc of "old" Western Europe and its former colonies, the US and Canada.

Having successfully survived and won the Cold War, NATO faced its first problem - it had lost its purpose and mission. The solution was NATO's involvement in Western expeditionary campaigns in distant underdeveloped countries with predominantly Muslim populations - from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya. It looked bad morally, but in battles against insurgents in flip-flops and with old Kalashnikov riffles and RPGs, NATO troops were guaranteed victory. However, the result was still a bloody mess.

NATO was saved by Putin, who in the mid-2000s began to clash with the West along Russia's western borders. The alliance once again got a raison d'être. The more so as by that time NATO had moved closer to Russia's borders. But at the expense of what? At the expense of the accession of structurally weak states of the former Eastern bloc, the "new Europe". They occupied a special niche in the alliance because they often supported the American desire to redefine the role of Western Europeans and other important players in the alliance.

Now the rifts within the global West are largely hidden thanks to the war. But they have grown. Finland's accession to NATO takes place against the backdrop of Poland becoming the dominant military power and Washington's main ally on the European continent at the expense of Germany's marginalisation, as well as Britain's and Poland's attempts to build an additional alliance parallel to NATO and other Western structures. At the same time, the "Bucharest Nine" EU-NATO member states are trying to build a "sanitary corridor" around Russia, which will also entail a conflict of interest with Western European countries. The conflict with Western European countries within the EU and NATO in relation to Russia is already openly reported by the press close to the Polish government.

In other words, the Eastern European countries have carved out an important niche in the EU-NATO, but it is more about their services to Washington than about the objective weight and power of those countries. Finland's accession would further strengthen the political position of the Eastern European grouping within NATO, a country politically and historically similar to the Eastern European states. But can NATO lean on Eastern Europe? After all, despite years of structural subsidies from the EU, they have not strengthened economically for the most part. And no matter how much US politicians criticise Western Europe, NATO has always held on to Western European countries and the US.

Closing the window to Europe

NATO's eastward expansion looks potentially risky, but NATO's problems do not mean Russia's successes. What does Putin want to achieve anyway? In an interview recently, Sergei Karaganov, a political analyst close to the Kremlin, reiterated that the main purpose of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to stop the spread of the "NATO cancer". However, in an attempt to prevent a "NATO near Rostov" situation, the Kremlin had already agreed to a "NATO near St Petersburg" situation in 2014. In an attempt to save the Black Sea Fleet from the fate of being expelled from Crimea, the Kremlin agreed in the Baltic not only to an increasing blockade of the Kaliningrad region, and difficulties in foreign trade but also to the prospect of the Baltic Fleet being trapped in shallow waters!

The problem for Moscow is not that the Russian border with NATO will be extended from 1233 km to 2572 km. Once Finland joins NATO (and probably Sweden by the summer), NATO will control the Baltic Fleet's access to the Baltic Sea itself, as well as more than 90 per cent of the Baltic Sea coastline. In addition, the alliance's role in the Arctic will also increase as all - apart from Russia - states in the region will be part of NATO. This would have far-reaching consequences for the freedom of action of the only Russian fleet capable of operating relatively freely in the world's oceans - the Northern Fleet.

It is incomprehensible, but the Kremlin leadership has declared all this unimportant. In May 2022, Putin stated that "Russia has no problems with these states (Finland and Sweden)" and therefore "no immediate threat of expansion at the expense of these countries for Russia". Medvedev, the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, echoed him, saying he was sympathetic to the actions of Helsinki and Stockholm, "if they feel better and calmer".

But in reality, the Kremlin simply has nothing to respond to NATO's entry into Finland. It is impossible for the Russian government to get out - it has driven itself into an Eastern European political quagmire. Russia's chief tragedy is that it still makes global claims while remaining a deeply East European state. All Russian life is concentrated in a small western part of its territory. It is this disproportion between its ambitions and its real capacities that make it such a problematic player.

Russia could take some radical strategic steps to resolve this situation, transforming itself into a more versatile power. It could begin to develop towards the Caspian, the Northern Sea Route, Central Asia and the Far East. But less has been done on each of them than on Eastern Europe which is for the time being a strategic dead-end for Russia. The timid attempts to move Russia's capital to Siberia after the war are illustrative in this regard - oligarch Oleg Deripaska suggested at the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum, "It seems utopian, but why do we need capital in Moscow when all our interests are in Asia? The flight times of the missiles will be different, and everything else will look different if it is located in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk." The topic was tried to be raised at the Valdai Discussion Club in October, but Putin refused to discuss it...

Finland will close the sea and sky

But back to Russia's problems with Finland, which are not limited to NATO. Early last year Finland agreed with Washington to purchase 64 F-35 multi-role fighters. This aircraft is the standard US nuclear weapon carrier for the non-US military. The deal took on a new colour when it emerged in October that the leftist and green (!) Finnish government had included the possibility of deploying nuclear weapons into Finland's NATO membership plans.

And here is another decision that outweighs Finland's membership in the alliance. On the March 25, the air force commanders of Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden signed an agreement of cooperation and intention to unite the air forces and use them together based on NATO methods. At the moment, such a joint air force will include 57 Norwegian F-16s and 37 F-35s, 62 Finnish F/A-18s, 58 Danish F-16s and 90 Swedish Gripen. Another 106 F-35s will be added in the foreseeable future, which is the total number of planes that Norway, Finland and Denmark have already bought. This means that Finland and its regional allies could soon (even without NATO) challenge Russia in the air, putting Kaliningrad's air links with the rest of Russia into question.

In addition, in August it was announced that once Finland joins NATO, its coastal defence will be combined with that of Estonia. The Estonian defence minister pointed out that "the range of Estonian and Finnish missiles exceeds the width of the Gulf of Finland" - hence, the Russian Baltic Fleet would be targeted as soon as it left its bases, and Kaliningrad's maritime communications with the rest of Russia would be dependent on Helsinki and Tallinn. As a reminder, by land Moscow's access to Kaliningrad has already been reduced to a minimum by Lithuania since the autumn.

Undoubtedly, Helsinki is capable to challenge Moscow. In January this year, the Finnish military aid to Ukraine has reached €590 million since the beginning of the war. And this is not a passing impulse but a quiet but steady trend over many years. Recall how, back in the relatively peaceful year of 2017, the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat caused a stir by reporting on intensive radio-electronic reconnaissance against Russian troops in the former Leningrad military district and the Finnish military's exploration of installing surveillance equipment for the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

Against this background, it is interesting that Finland - like a number of other countries, including Germany - for decades built its economy and prosperity on cooperation with the Soviet Union and then with Russia. Moreover, unlike the Baltic States or Ukraine, it has not been threatened by the new strategy adopted since the late 2000s by several Russian corporations and the Kremlin itself. It de facto required the removal of flows of goods and communications from neighbouring countries, disparagingly referred to as "limitrophs". A striking example of this was the threat of abandoning oil and gas transit through Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and other states of the region via the use of alternative routes like the "Northern Stream".

Finland was not threatened by this - on the contrary, the Nord Streams gave it additional leverage over Russia, as it passed through Finland's exclusive economic zone. The Russian-Finnish economic cooperation was very visible - the Finnish population saw its benefits directly, and Helsinki had not had any special disputes with Moscow for a long time.

Then how come Finland has taken a radical new turn towards NATO and changed its policy so that, as the Russian ambassador put it, trade relations between Russia and Finland have "practically collapsed"? The population, of course, has not been asked about it, no referendums on NATO membership are held in principle, and the politicians only quote the results of various opinion polls to confirm the policy. Incidentally, the government that made the decision to join NATO on an emergency basis was defeated in last Sunday's elections.

How long can we deny objective reality?

But if the population may simply not be able to express their opinion - organising a "Maidan" is not easy - then why did the Finnish establishment decide on such a risky course? And why in the Russian Federation do we see a complete denial of the harmfulness of the recent events for the basic interests of Russia? It is all logical here as well - the fact is that radical constructivism has long been a characteristic feature of modern politics both in Eastern Europe and in Russia. In other words, if during the Cold War it was mainly a question of objective material reality, facts and figures, in the 1990s a theory emerged in political science, which declared that all this was not so important. Reality is said to be "constructed"; facts do not matter and do not exist until they are "invented". This theory soon became one of the tenets of liberal democracy and was adopted by the Russian establishment.

Worse still, constructivism created the basis for a radical revisionism of the world order. Instead of searching for further ways of coexistence between peoples and countries actually living side by side, even the objective preconditions for coexistence were destroyed, to the point of denying the existence of each other. In Russia, they began to talk about "invented nations"; in the EU-NATO, they began to explain that access to cheap Russian resources, which had, in fact, given Europe its economic advance, was in fact evil. Under this approach, one can now exult that Finland has successfully "got off the Russian oil and gas needle".

The problem of denying objective material reality seems to be the fundamental cause of the current global crisis in general. And yet, material reality has ruthlessly punished nations and states that have denied it. In the USSR, they used to talk for a long time about "decaying capitalism" and the successes of building socialism until the USSR itself fell into the abyss in 1991. To take a milder, but more recent example, we were told for twenty years about the success of the United States and NATO in building a liberal, democratic Afghanistan, and the whole world nodded its head in spite of the facts occasionally surfacing to the contrary. However, in the end, the Taliban reality returned in its full glory, and those who believed in this fairy tale were thrown from the wheels of a flying American plane (some of them literally).

Compounding matters in the current situation of the NATO-Russia confrontation is the fact that both sides of the conflict are living in an illusory world and actually only hear an echo of their own voice. Their determination not to hear their opponent differs only in technical details: in the Russian Federation, the use of Facebook was publicly banned, while in the EU, in the interests of democracy, access to not only Russian but even Belarusian state mass media and state bodies has been quietly cut off! In the past, even when fighting with Iraq, Iran, Libya, and other similar opponents, Western countries did not go as far as this.