Finland joins NATO in historic shift sparked by Russia's war

Finland joins NATO in historic shift sparked by Russia's war
By Max DELANY
Brussels (AFP) April 4, 2023

Finland's blue-and-white Nordic cross flag was hoisted outside NATO headquarters on Tuesday as it became the alliance's 31st member, in a historic realignment of Europe's defences spurred by Russia's war on Ukraine.

NATO leaders will now turn up the pressure on their awkward allies Hungary and Turkey to lift their block on Sweden joining.

Helsinki's strategic shift -- which ended decades of military non-alignment -- has doubled the length of the US-led alliance's land border with Russia and drew an angry warning of "countermeasures" from the Kremlin.

Finland's foreign minister formally sealed Helsinki's membership by depositing the accession papers before the Finnish flag was raised between those of France and Estonia to the singing of a choir outside NATO's gleaming Brussels headquarters.

"Finland now has the strongest friends and allies in the world," NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said, had "wanted to slam NATO's door shut. Today we show the world that he failed, that aggression and intimidation do not work".

Joining NATO puts Finland under the alliance's Article Five, the collective defence pledge that an attack on one member "shall be considered an attack against them all".

This was the guarantee Finnish leaders decided they needed as they watched Putin's devastating assault on Ukraine.

"NATO membership strengthens our international position and room for manoeuvre," Finland's President Sauli Niinisto said.

US President Joe Biden said the alliance was strengthened by its newest member and promised to "defend every inch of NATO territory".

But Moscow erupted in fury at the move, which takes its frontier with NATO member states to 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles), branding it an "assault" on Russia's security and national interests.

"This forces us to take countermeasures... in tactical and strategic terms," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

- Powerful military -

Invaded by its giant neighbour, the Soviet Union, in 1939, Finland -- which has a 1,300-kilometre border with Russia -- stayed out of NATO throughout the Cold War.

Now its membership brings a potent military into the alliance with a wartime strength of 280,000 and one of Europe's largest artillery arsenals.

Its strategic location bolsters NATO's defences on a border running from the vulnerable Baltic states to the increasingly competitive Arctic.

Senior NATO military commander Admiral Rob Bauer told AFP that Finland had so far not requested its new allies station troops on its soil.

NATO officials say the war in Ukraine has sapped Moscow's forces, but the alliance is monitoring how Russia responds to gauge its future steps.

Turkey and Hungary, attempting to gain leverage over allies in separate political battles, had delayed Finland's bid to come under the NATO umbrella -- and Stockholm's progress remains blocked.

But last week, the Turkish parliament voted to clear Finland's final hurdle.

Completing the ratification in well under a year still makes this the fastest membership process in the alliance's recent history.

NATO was created as a counterweight to the Soviet Union at the onset of the Cold War era that began immediately after the Allies defeated Nazi Germany.

- Sweden soon? -

Finland's arrival nevertheless remains a bittersweet moment for the alliance as the hope had been for Sweden to come on board at the same time.

Helsinki's first act as a new member was to back Stockholm's bid.

Budapest and Ankara remain the holdouts after belatedly agreeing to wave through Helsinki's bid.

Sweden has upset Hungary's leader Viktor Orban -- one of Putin's closest allies in Europe -- by expressing alarm over the rule of law in Hungary.

It has also angered Turkey by refusing to extradite dozens of suspects that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan links to a failed 2016 coup attempt and the decades-long Kurdish independence struggle.

The United States and other NATO members led the calls for Sweden to join as soon as Finland's flag was fluttering in the cold Brussels breeze.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he believed both countries would take part in a NATO summit in Vilnius this summer as new members.

Ukraine is also pushing for eventual NATO membership, but Western diplomats say that remains a distant prospect.

"There is no better strategic solution to ensuring strategic security in the Euro-Atlantic region than the membership of Ukraine in the alliance," Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said.

Stoltenberg said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was invited to NATO's Vilnius summit in July.

The focus for the alliance remains on bolstering Kyiv's capacities to win the war, while moving it towards NATO membership only over the longer term.

Finland in NATO: strategic shift with material gain
Paris (AFP) April 4, 2023 - Finland on Tuesday becoming the 31st member of NATO is a strategic step that doubles the military alliance's border with Russia and provides the coalition with additional military capacity.

Here are the key facts:

- Russia 'more vulnerable' -

Finland broke with decades of non-alignment to ask to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after Russia invaded its pro-Western neighbour Ukraine in February last year.

For Moscow, which has repeatedly warned NATO against expanding, Finland's accession extends the bloc's presence right on its western doorstep.

Russia -- which shares a 1,300-kilometre (800-mile) border with Finland -- said on Monday it would boost its military presence in its west and northwest in response.

With Finland joining NATO, "Russia's northwestern flank becomes more vulnerable", security experts Nicholas Lokker and Heli Hautala wrote on Friday on defence-focused website War on the Rocks.

"Its border with the alliance will then extend from the Arctic Ocean to the Baltic Sea."

- More NATO border to defend -

As a NATO member, Finland is bound by the alliance's mutual defence clause, Article 5.

It will benefit not only from its allies' conventional military assistance but also from their nuclear deterrence.

In return, the Nordic nation, which intends to boost its defence budget by 40 percent by 2026, could contribute some of its military resources to defend the alliance.

The country of 5.5 million people counts just 12,000 professional soldiers.

But it trains more that 20,000 each year through its conscription service programme, giving the army a pool of 900,000 Finns as potential reserves.

This means that in case of war, the army can deploy 280,000 Finnish citizens at any one time.

It has a fleet of 55 F-18 US combat aircraft, which it plans to replace with more advanced F-35s from 2025 onwards, as well as 200 tanks and more than 700 artillery guns.

But the country joining NATO also means hundreds of extra kilometres of border to defend for the alliance.

- Allied forces -

The only military equipment that NATO actually owns are a fleet of Airborne Warning and Control System planes (AWACS) -- which can monitor an area almost as big as Poland -- and five Global Hawk high-altitude surveillance drones.

For all other military gear, each NATO member chooses what to contribute, though all have promised to reinforce the alliance's eastern flank.

France dispatched 500 troops to join US soldiers in Romania last year right after Russia invaded Ukraine. Dutch and Belgian soldiers soon joined them.

As of December, some 5,000 foreign troops were stationed in Romania -- the largest contingent of allied forces on the bloc's southeastern flank.

NATO conducted nine joint exercises last year, from the eastern Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) says.

- The troops -

"Together NATO allies represent 50 percent of the world's military might," NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday welcoming Finland into the alliance. "As long as we stand together and protect each other... there will be no military attack against a NATO ally."

According to the Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE), NATO can count on up to 3.5 million soldiers and personnel.

The three nations providing most military staff are the United States with 1.47 million active troops plus 800,000 reservists, Turkey with 425,000 soldiers and 200,000 reservists, and France with 210,000 troops and 40,000 reservists.

NATO has since 2004 had a multinational response force of some 40,000 soldiers on top of the 100,000 US troops already on European soil. It says it hopes to increase this to 300,000 soldiers.

It has also set up a "spearhead force" within it, dubbed the "Very High Readiness Joint Task Force" or VJTF, able to deploy 5,000 personnel in two to three days.

- 'Renewed unity' -

NATO had in recent years faced an existential crisis.

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 famously said that NATO was experiencing "brain death" after it failed to respond to Turkey's unilateral invasion of northeast Syria.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin's "re-invasion of Ukraine has provided the fuel for the alliance's renewed unity and recommitment to cooperative security, crisis management, and collective defence," retired general Philip M. Breedlove, who used to head US European Command, wrote in February.

According to IISS, the alliance has since doubled its deployment from four battle groups -- in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland -- to eight, including Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

But "it is likely that most of the high-readiness forces will need to be European", it said in an annual assessment for 2023.