Finland’s official accession to NATO, which took place last week, was to be the fulfillment of one of Vladimir Putin’s worst nightmares: for 16 years, at least since 2007, the Russian leader has spoken in his “Munich speech” of the threat of NATO enlargement to Russia as something he seeks to forestall.
Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, in an interview with the Russian media service, commented on the issue of Finland’s entry into NATO as follows:
“Ultimately, the result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was the joining of NATO by two traditionally neutral states. Sweden hasn’t entered into military alliances since 1809, and that, of course, is Putin’s “success story” when a two-century tradition was simply undone due to his actions in one fell swoop. Finland, which was also neutral for about 80 years, has already become a member of NATO, and the two countries decided to join the alliance largely because of the terrible brutality they witnessed during the Russian attack on Ukraine.
It is precisely the behavior of the leadership of Russia and the Russian army, Toomas Hendrik Ilves is convinced, that has become the main motive for Finns and Swedes to regard Russia as a neighbor, of which it is better to be protect with a military alliance: “The atrocities in Bucha, discovered after his liberation, as in other cities, where there were massacres, rapes, where torture chambers were organized, etc., seriously pushed people in Sweden and Finland to join NATO, and they realized that the approach of “let’s live together, let’s join hands”, etc., apparently doesn’t work anymore.”
Sweden did not enter into military alliances for more than 200 years, partly because of the diplomacy of Imperial Russia, and Finland was known for its policy towards the USSR, which was very different from the attitude of others. European countries towards Moscow. Now all of that is a thing of the past.
At the same time, many scholars of Putin’s political career recall that Putin himself had a desire to join NATO and participate in the decision-making of the alliance, and in the military leadership of Russia. in the 2000s (in particular, then Russian Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov) cooperated directly with NATO and did not see anything dangerous in the increase in the number of member countries of this organization.
Putin’s tone changed after the start of the war between the United States and its allies in Iraq, but a drastic turn came after the events in Georgia and Ukraine, when the Kremlin believed the West had the intention to change the regime in different countries with soft or hard power.
Pavel Baev, a leading expert at the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO) in Oslo, in an interview with the Russian media service, said the topic of missiles was of particular importance to Putin in this era :
“I saw Putin having a very strong reaction about the missiles, he was very worried about the missiles. He repeatedly came back to this subject, saying that, they say, American submarines have been deployed in the Norwegian fjords, and he reacted particularly strongly when American ships entered the Black Sea with missiles there, and he would have looked at them in the crosshairs, and also for the missiles in Romania.
At the same time, Baev does not believe that Putin was really afraid of NATO expansion:
“I don’t think he was really scared about it. However, the use of this bogey, the use of this completely outlandish threat as a political tool, was on the rise. He used it to justify his own actions, as well as to find something to talk about with those in the West who didn’t like it. And it was really quite a large audience – there were experts, there were leftists, there were also righties, in general, this topic resonated.
Toomas Hendrik Ilves also notes that Putin’s thesis on the danger of NATO enlargement for Russia had many supporters in the West:
“There is a circle of useful idiots in the West who subscribed to his bogeymen, but it is worth remembering that Putin was in fact ok with NATO enlargement until December 2021, when he issued an ultimatum to leave the alliance of countries that joined it.
Now the real expansion of the North Atlantic Alliance, which has doubled its border with Russia due to Moscow’s actions, can leave official Kremlin rhetoric – so as not to remind the electorate that it is exactly what the ruler tried to prevent and apparently failed. Pavel Baev has already seen the first signs of this in official documents:
“I was surprised by the concept of foreign policy that Putin has just approved: it says nothing at all about NATO, neither about enlargement nor about the threat. NATO is mentioned in the same sentence as the Council of Europe, separated by commas – and that’s it! He speaks of “the United States and its satellites”, of the “Anglo-Saxons”, of the “rudiments of American domination” – of anything, but literally almost nothing of NATO. This topic miraculously disappeared.
