Finland becomes NATO's 31st member pushed by Russia's war in Ukraine

Finland has become a formal member of NATO on Tuesday.

Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine and threats from President Vladimir Putin have sparked a historic shift in Finnish security policy, which has gone from being a militarily non-aligned country to becoming the 31st member of the Atlantic Alliance.

The organization hopes to join Sweden very soon, whose access remains blocked by Turkey and Hungary, which have not yet ratified access for various political reasons.

“President Putin wanted to slam the door on NATO.

Now we show him that he has failed ”, remarked the Secretary General of NATO, the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg.

“Instead of less, he has achieved the opposite, more NATO;

and we will keep the doors open”, he said on Tuesday before the Finnish flag-raising ceremony at the Alliance headquarters in Brussels, together with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto.

“The era of military non-alignment in our history has come to an end.

A new era begins”, declared the Finnish president.

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The war in Ukraine, live

Finland's accession to NATO, with its more than 1,300 kilometers of borders with its Russian neighbor, doubles those that the Alliance shares with Russia.

This is happening at a time of extremely high tension and when Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which continues to spark major geopolitical changes, has now lasted for more than 13 months.

The Kremlin has gone to great lengths to differentiate Finland's accession from the invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance, in force since 2008, and which Moscow often uses in its rhetoric to justify its invasion on the grounds that NATO's rapprochement with Russian borders poses a threat to their security.

kyiv's chances of real access to the military organization – of which Spain is a member – have not advanced since it received the invitation 15 years ago.

Moscow has warned on Tuesday that the Helsinki movement forces it to take countermeasures and that it will strengthen its military capacity in its western and northwestern regions.

He has also remarked that the entry of the Nordic country into the Alliance increases the risk of conflict with the West.

"NATO enlargement encroaches on our security and Russia's national interests," Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said in a conference call with journalists, according to the Russian agency Interfax.

Peskov has stressed that Moscow will closely follow how NATO "uses" Finnish territory and if weapons, systems and infrastructure of the Atlantic Alliance, which turns 74 on Tuesday, are deployed there.

Helsinki will address the stationing of foreign troops on its territory in the future, Finnish Defense Minister Antti Kaikkonen said on Tuesday.

Finland brings to NATO a powerful army and, with the history of a Russian neighbor, which it has continued to expand and modernize at a time when others in Europe had stopped thinking about defense.

Helsinki already meets the Alliance's requirement to invest 2% of its GDP in defense;

a goal that many of its allies have not yet reached (Spain is around 1%).

the fastest entry

The Finnish army, moreover, has been in tune with the standards and doctrine of the Alliance for years due to its already close military ties with the Atlantic organization.

That is why its entry has been so fast, the fastest in the history of NATO.

Its membership gives NATO highly sensitive territory in the Baltic Sea and on the Kola Peninsula.

Finland and Sweden applied hand in hand last year, not long after Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The intention was for the two Nordic countries to join together, but Stockholm's accession has fallen by the wayside.

All the organization's allies must ratify the new admissions and Turkey and Hungary have yet to do so.

Ankara alludes to terrorism concerns when it is pressing Stockholm (which has changed its anti-terror law) to win concessions on the extradition of Turkish refugee citizens.

Specifically, those who the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan considers terrorists due to their alleged links to the Kurdish armed group PKK, to the political-religious society of the Islamist cleric Fethullah Gülen or to extreme left organizations.

Meanwhile, Budapest, which has already made the blocking of key issues a bargaining chip in its relationship with European institutions, is using the military organization to push issues related, in reality, to the European Union, of which both Hungary and Sweden are members. members.

Thus, his goal is to get Brussels to unfreeze European funds that he is keeping paralyzed until the Government of Viktor Orbán complies with reforms against corruption and to guarantee the independence of justice.

The United States and the United Kingdom, members of NATO, have demanded this Tuesday that "all members of the Alliance" ratify Sweden's accession as soon as possible.

"Russia's new invasion of Ukraine last year precipitated precisely what President Putin wanted to avoid: a stronger and more unified Transatlantic Alliance," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned in Brussels, where he participated in meetings of the military organization.

"Sweden is also a strong and capable partner that is ready to join NATO," he added.

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