Finland is already the thirty-first member of NATO. Less than a year after I applied for admission. "Today is a historic day" for the Alliance, assured the general secretary of the organization, Jens Stoltenberg. The Nordic country hand-delivered the accession document after the approval of Turkey and Hungary. Shortly afterwards, the country's flag was raised for the first time at the organization's headquarters in Brussels, followed by a meeting of foreign ministers.
"On this day, in 1949, the founding treaty of NATO, the Treaty of Washington, was signed. It's hard to imagine a better way to celebrate our birthday than by welcoming Finland," said Stoltenberg. The Secretary General also remarked that the step taken by Finland is the "direct result" of the war "of President Putin against Ukraine".
The invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago caused an unprecedented shift in Finnish politics, historically neutral with a complicated past with its Russian neighbor. "Finland has a history that speaks of the brutality that a war can cause to the country", recalled Stoltenberg, who compared the situation that Ukraine is currently experiencing with that of Finland during the Winter War, the invasion attempt by the Soviet Union in 1939.
Despite the fact that Finland's entry means incorporating 1,340 kilometers of new border with Russia, there are no immediate plans to deploy troops from the organization on Finnish territory. "There will be no NATO troops in Finland without its consent," Stoltenberg assured. "What we have in many countries are exercises, air and naval presence, but we do not have a permanent presence. This issue has not been present in our discussions so far".
The Minister of Defense of Finland, Antti Kaikkonen, assured on this issue that the country must decide whether it will request the deployment of NATO troops on its territory. "It will be the next issue we have to discuss," he explained. Right now NATO has battalions deployed on its eastern flank. Since 2017 they have been deployed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and last year, after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they extended to Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.
What is more relevant, Stoltenberg concluded, is that Finland now "has a security guarantee shielded thanks to Article 5, our collective defense clause of 'one for all and all for one', which will apply from today in Finland".
Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, described Finland's entry as an attack on Russian interests and an increase in military tension. "This forces us to take countermeasures to guarantee security, both tactically and strategically," the Russian leader emphasized. A day earlier, the Kremlin had already warned that it will strengthen its military capacity in the western and northwestern regions of the country.
In the days before the Russian army entered Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin had demanded less presence of the Atlantic Alliance near Russian borders. After Finland's entry into NATO, Moscow has achieved the opposite: more NATO in the vicinity of its territory.
The Russian Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, declared, for his part, that the step taken by Finland "creates risks of a significant expansion of the conflict" in Ukraine. During a meeting of the Russian military leadership, Shoigu assured that this issue, however, will not affect the development of what Russia calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine.
