Proof that Putin’s Ukraine invasion has spectacularly backfired
ussia’s President Vladimir Putin will not be happy with Finland becoming the 31st member of Nato. The date is significant – 4 April – which marks the anniversary of the signing of the Nato treaty 74 years ago.
Yet Putin has only himself to blame for this most significant enlargement of the Western alliance in some time.
Before Putin invaded Ukraine last year, barely 30 per cent of Finns wanted their country to join Nato. Finland was largely comfortable with the dense network of security partnerships that it had devised since the end of the Cold War: close cooperation with Nato, participation in the EU’s common security and defence policy and military integration with its neighbour, Sweden, and the other Nordic partners.
Yet overnight public support for joining Nato shot up to around 80 per cent, and has stayed there ever since. Nato membership did not feature as an issue in last weekend’s Finnish elections despite the broad spectrum of parties participating. So, what has changed? Essentially two things.
First, Finnish security policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has rested on the assumption that Russia would accept the borders and new system of states that emerged from that collapse. Yet in annexing Crimea in 2014, and now seeking to annex more areas of Ukraine’s territory, Putin has made clear that all borders that are once part of the Czarist or Soviet system are open to revision. This has profoundly unsettled the Finns, who believed that they had a predictable if delicate relationship with Moscow…
