At a meeting about NATO aid to Ukraine in Warsaw on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden told Polish President Andrzej Duda he had once warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about what he described as the “NATO-ization of Finland,” which applied to join the alliance last year.
"As I told my Russian counterpart not - well, it's a while now - I said, you're seeking the Findland-ization of NATO, you're going to get the NATO-ization of Finland. Turns out I didn't know Sweden was coming along as well," Biden said.
"The United States needs Poland and NATO as much as Poland and NATO need the United States," Biden said, adding that the alliance was "stronger than it has ever been.”
Helsinki and Stockholm applied to join the NATO alliance last Spring after Russia launched its special operation in Ukraine, which was triggered by attempts by the US to force Kiev into joining NATO and allowing offensive weapons to be stationed there. However, their path to membership has been rocky, due to both governments’ support for Kurdish forces considered by Turkiye, another NATO ally, to be terrorist groups. Helsinki has been quicker to move than Stockholm in satisfying Ankara’s demands, meaning Finland could join NATO as soon as July, while Sweden will likely not.
‘There Was No Threat Before’
After their NATO applications were announced, Putin said the nations were free to join if they wished, but that if offensive NATO weapons were stationed there, Moscow would react in “a mirror way.”
Putin said “there was no threat before," but if military equipment or troops are deployed along the border, Moscow will have to "respond in a mirror manner and create the same threats in the territories from which they threaten us."
"For us, the membership of Finland and Sweden in NATO is not at all the same as the membership of Ukraine, these are completely different things. They understand this very well ... No. This is a completely different thing,” Putin added, noting that unlike Ukraine, Finland and Sweden did not persecute their Russian ethnic minorities.
From Adversary to Partner
However, like Ukraine and the Baltic States, Finland’s military closeness with the West is still a sensitive spot for Russia. The country was granted independence from the Russian Empire after the 1917 Russian Revolution, but joined the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany and participated in the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, including the 872-day siege of Leningrad that killed more than 1.5 million people.
However, Finland signed a separate peace with Moscow in 1944 and afterward pursued a policy laid out by Presidents Juho Kusti Paasikivi and Urho Kekkonen that would preserve the country’s autonomy and its capitalist system by maintaining good relations with both the Soviet Union and the capitalist Western powers.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Finland began to more openly associate with NATO, joining the Partnership for Peace program in 1994. However, it maintained its neutrality until after Russia launched its special operation in Ukraine in February 2022.
That operation was undertaken after months of failed negotiations with NATO in which Washington declared Russia’s security red lines, which included the stationing of offensive weapons in Ukraine, to be a “non-starter.” The operation also seeks to end the persecution of Russian-speakers in the Donbass region, who form a majority there and who faced eight years of attacks by neo-Nazi groups as well as legislative actions aimed at degrading their equal status as Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
A total of five majority-Russophone provinces have left Ukraine and joined the Russian Federation via referendum since 2014.