Russia strengthens its air defense after Finland's entry into NATO

The Russian armed forces will reinforce its northwestern border in view of the recent addition of Finland to NATO and the forthcoming accession of Sweden (still pending the approval of Turkey and Hungary).

The extension of more than 1,300 kilometers of the contact zone with the Atlantic Alliance has been classified as a threat by the head of Russian air defense, Commander Andrei Diomin, who has advanced this first measure before the expansion of the Alliance in border territory with Russia.

The commander has assured in an interview that his forces have drawn lessons from the invasion of Ukraine in terms of protection against enemy missiles and drones.

According to the high command, Russia already has its first domestically-made anti-aircraft systems capable of shooting down the tiny unmanned aerial vehicles that,

“Finland joined the NATO bloc on April 5.

Sweden is preparing to join the alliance.

Under these conditions, the air defense forces are solving the problems that arise for the protection of the state border in the northwest of the country, according to the increase in the level of threats," Diomin said in an interview published in the army newspaper. Russian,

.

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The military does not explain what changes are being made in the reorganization of the Russian defense.

Norwegian intelligence services warned earlier this year that Moscow had equipped its Northern Fleet with nuclear weapons for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union to counteract the transfer of ground forces from the Baltic and Nordic areas to war. from Ukraine.

The incorporation of Finland and Sweden into the allied bloc worries the Kremlin, although it is much less traumatic than the entry of Ukraine and Georgia, countries that the Kremlin considers its backyard and whose hypothetical accession to NATO it totally rejects.

"Russia has no problems with these States and, therefore, the enlargement to those countries does not create an immediate threat to Russia," Vladimir Putin came to say in May 2022 after learning of the formal application for membership of Helsinki and Stockholm.

The Russian president has made an effort over these months to convey a message in which he played down the importance of the step taken by two countries that until now maintained their non-aligned status, but which the invasion of Ukraine has ended up pushing to adhere to a defensive alliance.

Faced with this discourse regarding the Nordics, Putin emphasized, three days before launching his invasion, that Kiev's incorporation into NATO "would be like having a knife to the throat" because if missiles were deployed in Kharkov, "it would take seven eight minutes to reach Moscow, and hypersonic rockets, four to five minutes.

But geographical distances do not justify this double message.

The Kharkiv border region in Ukraine is about 650 kilometers from the Russian capital, while Pasiene in Latvia is less than 630.

In an attempt to highlight the strength of his army, Commander Andrei Diomin stresses in the interview that the experience gained from the war against Ukraine is invaluable to his army.

The military man estimates that his air defense forces carried out some 200 exercises last year, and in them "practical actions were developed to detect and destroy drones, rockets, and ballistic missiles."

kyiv airstrikes carried out successfully

kyiv has carried out several successful airstrikes against Russian military targets hundreds of kilometers from the border.

First there were the bombings of air bases located on the Crimean peninsula, illegally annexed by the Kremlin in 2014. Those attacks, during the summer of 2022, surprised even tourists staying in the vicinity of the military installations.

Later, in December, Ukraine bombed two airfields hundreds of kilometers from the border.

The Ryazan and Saratov airbases were allegedly struck by Soviet-made rockets.

To these attacks have been added many others carried out against other military points in the border area, and other chapters such as the one that occurred on February 28,

Diomin has announced that Moscow has already deployed its first RLC-MC

systems in critical infrastructures.

These are equipment capable of detecting and shooting down tiny aerial vehicles.

“Due to the small reflective surface of tactical drones, it is quite problematic to detect their flight with standard radar equipment,” the commander explains during the interview.

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