“The Russian zone of influence is shrinking very sharply”, explains Cyril Coulet, researcher specializing in the Nordic countries, Tuesday April 4 on franceinfo, while Finland has become the 31st member of NATO, after three decades of military non-alignment. For its part, Moscow denounces a “achievement” to his safety and promised “countermeasures”.
franceinfo. This arrival of Finland is not nothing, so far Russia had few borders with member countries of NATO…
Cyril Coulet. During the Cold War, we had a small piece of Norwegian territory and the border with Turkey. There, Finland adds more than 1,300 kilometers of common border between NATO and Russia. Moreover, it almost closes the Baltic Sea area, which is not a minor issue for Russia either. The Russian zone of influence is greatly reduced. The enclave of Kaliningrad finds itself even more isolated and the Baltic countries find themselves comforted in their strategic position in relation to Russia. So there is a shift that is not neutral for Russia, since it sees its influence in the northern region and its possibilities of action reduced.
Is the fact that there is no “buffer zone” between NATO countries and Russia a risk for the international community?
Russia demonstrated, by offering the status of “neutrality” to Ukraine in February 2022, just before its invasion, that the status of neutrality did not necessarily offer a guarantee of security. Neither from an individual point of view, for the country that is carrying it, nor necessarily from a collective point of view, since this ultimately only leads to having a zone of non-presence, of non-parking of military forces and lack of commitment at a time when we see that the collective security provided by the UN is being seriously called into question.
Is there a better guarantee of security when one belongs to NATO?
These security guarantees already existed within the European Union. Nevertheless, the guarantee provided by the United States, in particular the American nuclear umbrella, seems to offer some additional guarantees compared to the simple nuclear umbrella that France could have offered to its partners in the European Union.
Symbolically, this entry of Finland into NATO is also very strong because, since the creation of the USSR, these two countries, Finland and Russia, have never had very cordial relations…
Finland has a very complicated history with Russia since it was detached from Sweden to be forcibly attached to Russia after the Napoleonic wars. She tried to break away from it in 1917, at the cost of a bloody civil war. It is only since the end of the Cold War that Finland has sought at all costs to establish itself in the West, by being the model pupil of the European Union. The war in Ukraine offered him the opportunity to join the Atlantic Alliance, which was undoubtedly the objective of Finnish diplomacy for the last thirty years. Finland has always lived under the Russian threat, so this is not an argument likely to come to impress the Finns on the one hand. On the other hand, today, the Russian threat is difficult to carry out since all the forces are concentrated on Ukraine. We do not imagine, in the short or medium term, Russia being able to mobilize new forces to be able to station them near the Finnish border.