Confirming expectations, Sweden joined Finland and formally asked on Monday (16) to join NATO, the Western military alliance created to combat Soviet expansion in Western Europe in 1949, whose mission was renewed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Europe, Sweden and the Swedish people are now living in a new and dangerous reality,” Prime Minister Magadalena Andersson told parliament in Stockholm. The accession process of the two new members, if it overcomes the opposition already posed by member Turkey, will be accelerated, says NATO.
In his first public speech after the Nordics confirmed their intention to join NATO, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the move “will certainly provoke our response”.
“What response will be … We’ll see what threats are created for us,” he told a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance vaguely similar to NATO, which brings together six states that were part of the Soviet Union and has Serbia as its observer.
Andersson herself has already indicated a middle way so as not to provoke the Russians further. She stated that there will be no multinational NATO bases or nuclear weapons on her territory if the application is approved. This would give the measure, in theory, of the proportionality suggested by Putin.
Finland, which has 1,300 km of border with Russia, should follow the same path, to mitigate the temperature of the crisis. Putin, for his part, complained that his country “had no problems” with the two new candidates for membership in the 30-member alliance.
Ukraine’s desire to join NATO, thereby establishing Western forces on its longest western border, was one of the central reasons the Kremlin alleged for starting what it calls a special military operation at the end of February.
The Swedish decision came a day after Finland ratified the request it had announced on Thursday (12), based on a supra-partisan report released on Friday (13) and the change of position for the country’s military neutrality by the majority group, the Social Party. Democrat, on Sunday (15).
With that, 213 years of non-alignment in the defense area were left aside. The Finns, on the other hand, abandoned the engineering of being Westerners with good relations with Russia, which they had operated since the end of World War II, in 1945, in which they fought against the Soviet Union.
Despite Putin’s measured speech suggesting that the idea of ​​placing nuclear weapons close to the Nordics’ borders may be just a threat, neighbors Sweden and Finland have promised military assistance if the countries are attacked by Moscow during the accession process.
The governments of Denmark, Norway and Iceland made the announcement, more rhetorical than practical: Finland and especially Sweden are countries far more militarily capable than their neighbors. Both were already part of several NATO communication structures, with whom they exercised frequently.
The military weight they add to the bloc is important due to the strategic position they occupy in the Baltic Sea, close to Russian borders and, mainly, to the militarized enclave of Kaliningrad, between Lithuania and Poland.
There must be some increase in military spending. NATO’s 29 countries had a defense budget of $360 billion in 2021 — the US alone added $811 billion to the account, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Finland and Sweden bring a 4% increase to the extra-US pie, that’s counting their current spending levels—Helsinki spends 2% of its GDP, NATO’s target, on defense, while Stockholm can still increase the 1.3% it currently employs in the sector. Today, one-third of the club’s countries meet the requirement stipulated in 2014 to run until 2025.
Before you think about it, however, there is Turkey. The country’s president, Recep Tayyp Erdogan, said he could not accept the Nordics because they are “hosts of terrorist organizations” — in this case, opponents of his government. There were talks between Turks, Swedes and Finns in Berlin over the weekend, and on Monday Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hulqvist said that “we are going to send a group of diplomats to talk to Turkey”.
The US, the real owners of the ball in the fractured alliance, said it was confident Ankara would not end up using the veto power that every NATO member has. Turkey has a long history of disagreements, sometimes with Washington, sometimes with internal rivals in the alliance such as the historic adversary Greece or France.
In the process, Russia has ambiguously approached Putin, with whom it maintains a tense partnership in areas such as the civil wars in Syria and Libya, or in the South Caucasus, in addition to having common energy projects. At the same time, he supports Kiev in the war.
