Finland joins NATO on Tuesday, days after Turkey confirmed the entry of the Nordic country, which becomes the 31st member of the world's largest military alliance. In a symbolic act in which the Finnish flag will be raised in front of the headquarters of the Atlantic Alliance in Brussels, Helsinki will culminate a historic change in its security policy triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The step will make "Finland safer and our alliance stronger," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday. Finland brings with it a potent military force, but it also increases defense challenges for the organization, because it shares a 1,340-kilometre border with Russia, which is more than double the size of the Alliance's current border with Moscow.
Here are some of the keys to the "historical" income:
Finland maintained a policy of military non-alignment until last year, which began when the country stopped an invasion attempt by the Soviet Union during World War II and chose to try to maintain friendly relations with neighboring Russia. But the recent invasion of another neighboring country, Ukraine, which began in February 2022, prompted the Finns to seek safety under the umbrella of NATO's collective defense pact, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. .
Finland has 12,000 professional soldiers, but trains more than 20,000 recruits a year and can count on 280,000 combat-capable soldiers in wartime, plus another 600,000 reservists, an exceptional force in Europe. The Nordic country, which expects to increase its defense budget by 40% by 2026, also has a fleet of 55 F-18 combat aircraft, which it intends to replace with US F-35s, 200 tanks, more than 600 armored personnel vehicles and more than 700 artillery pieces.
Finland represents a significant gain in capacity for an organization that, without its own armed forces, depends on the troops made available by each of its members. NATO's only military equipment is a fleet of Awacs (airborne detection and control system) aircraft and five Global Hawk surveillance drones.
According to the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers in Europe (Shape, in its acronym in English), NATO can "count up to almost 3.5 million troops, military and civilians combined." The three countries with the most soldiers are the United States (1.47 million active duty soldiers plus 800,000 reservists), Turkey (425,000 soldiers and 200,000 reservists), and France (210,000 soldiers and 40,000 reservists).
However, Finland's accession to the Alliance also means 1,340 more kilometers of border to defend, which supposes "a significant burden for NATO", as a European observer pointed out to France Presse. Specifically, the integration doubles the length of the border that the Alliance already shared with Russia. In this way, "the Russian border with the alliance will extend from the Arctic Ocean to the Baltic Sea", which is why its "western flank becomes more vulnerable," says the portal specialized in war information War on the Rocks.
Even before Finland formally joined the organization, its military has been reaching out to NATO and its members. In addition, surveillance flights by the United States and other allied air forces have already begun to circulate in Finnish airspace. And on March 24, the commanders of the Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish air forces pledged to create a unified Nordic air defense in order to counter the growing threat from Russia. The idea, among others, is to share radar data from surveillance systems to better control the joint airspace.
Russia has assured that it will not leave Finland's entry unanswered, seen as a new escalation in relations with the alliance, which would strengthen its military capacity in the western and northwestern regions. "It forces us to take countermeasures to guarantee our security," Russian Presidency spokesman Dmitri Peskov said on Tuesday, adding that Moscow will act based on how NATO "exploits Finnish territory" and whether it deploys its infrastructure near the russian border.
Russia considers that each new member of NATO displaces to the same extent the geostrategic border that opposes it to the United States. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow demanded that the alliance refrain from any expansion and military activity in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia. In response, NATO demanded "the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova", referring respectively to Crimea, annexed in 2014, Ossetia and Abkhazia by Georgia and Moldovan Transnistria.
Before the war, NATO suffered from existential problems. At the end of 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of his "brain death".
But the invasion of Ukraine has fostered the cohesion of its members as well as a greater commitment in defense spending to reach the figures that the alliance and the most important partner, the United States, had been demanding for years. Likewise, its deployment of troops in Europe has gone from four battle groups (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland) to eight (with Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia).
Sweden underwent a similar transformation in defense thinking as Finland, which is why both applied for NATO membership last year at the same time. But the plan fell apart when NATO member Turkey refused to go through with the Stockholm offer. Ankara accuses Sweden of harboring Kurdish migrants, whom it considers members of terrorist groups, and demands their extradition as a step towards ratifying Swedish membership. Hungary also puts stones in the road, due to Swedish criticism of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's democratic record.
NATO diplomats are hopeful that Budapest will approve the Swedish offer if Turkey makes the first move, something they predict after the presidential and parliamentary elections in May. Stoltenberg has been "absolutely sure" that Sweden will become a member of NATO. "It's a priority for NATO, for me, to make sure that happens as soon as possible," he said.
