Finland’s desire to join NATO, expressed by the Finnish executive, “is a failure” for Vladimir Putin, said Thursday, May 12 on franceinfo Jean Sylvestre Mongrenier, researcher at the French Institute of Geopolitics, associate researcher at the Thomas More Institute.
>> Find the latest developments in the war in Ukraine in our live
“Vladimir Putin expected to defeat Ukraine very quickly, and to astound all of Europe. We can see that he has answers in return”, emphasizes Jean Sylvestre Mongrenier. He also recalls that neutrality “strictly speaking” from Finland “didn’t exist anymore” since the mid-1990s.
franceinfo: This application for membership still seemed unimaginable a few months ago. Has the war in Ukraine changed everything?
Sylvester Mongrenier: It had an acceleration effect. The mask has fallen. What seemed unimaginable, an open attack by Russia on a neighboring sovereign state, accelerated this quasi-decision. But what you still have to bear in mind is that there were a number of developments that had happened since the early 1990s. What was called Finnish neutrality, or finlandization is something that was imposed by the USSR after the Second World War. It was still suffered by Finland. Afterwards, they knew how to deal with it, of course. But that had consequences for their foreign policy, for their domestic policy. There was interference, very strong pressure on their intellectual and cultural life. For example “The Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn in 1974, it had to be published in Stockholm. Bookstores were regularly purged of anything that might offend the USSR. So from the beginning of the 1990s, with the end of the cold war, with the end of the USSR, the Finns came out of what is called finlandization. In the mid-1990s, they joined the European Union. And in the European Union, there is a mutual defense clause, certainly weaker than that of NATO, but it exists. So stricto sensu, neutrality no longer existed. And also in the mid-1990s, Finland joined NATO’s partnership for peace. This meant that there was a rapprochement at that time, a development of interoperability, maneuvers, exercises. So you have to look at this over 20 or 30 years.
If Finland had been attacked by Russia, would there have been a European reaction, NATO or not?
It’s not entirely sure. Because the mutual defense clause of the European Union is still not very solid.
Can we imagine today an EU country being attacked by Russia without there being any reaction?
This is something to consider, when you look at a certain softness on the part of France and Germany, to say things as they are. The big difference in NATO is that there is the United States. And that the United States, by its weight, by its power, is able to provide much more solid security guarantees than those of the countries of the European Union.
For Vladimir Putin, is it a failure? Or is it a provocation?
It’s a fail. It’s not a provocation. He can feel it as such. But the problem is that he still feels very far from reality. If he feels he is fighting Nazism in Ukraine, what can we do about it? It’s in his head. This does not correspond to reality. The fact is that it is a backlash that was certainly not expected by Vladimir Putin, where he expected not only to defeat Ukraine very quickly, but to stun all of Europe. We realize that there are answers in return. But the Atlantic Alliance is a defensive alliance, it must be remembered.