Russia’s Military Build-Up Along The Finnish Border: The New Normal
Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter
This is a predictable response to Finland’s unnecessary and highly provocative decision to join NATO.
The New York Times (NYT) recently published an article about how “Russia Beefs Up Bases Near Finland’s Border”, which relied on satellite imagery to reach that conclusion. Russia’s northern military build-up is portrayed as ominous in their piece, with speculation abounding about its post-Ukraine plans among those who they interviewed. To their credit, the NYT’s authors did reference Russia’s perceptions about NATO expansion, but they didn’t take them to their logical conclusion with regard to Finland.
No mention is made about how unnecessary its decision to join NATO was. Prior to that, Finland was already a so-called “shadow member” of NATO in the sense of having closely integrated with the bloc and practically obtained interoperability with its forces after years of joint training. Nevertheless, it didn’t have Article 5 mutual defense guarantees, but they objectively weren’t needed since there was never any credible scenario where Russia would launch an unprovoked attack or all-out invasion of Finland.
Shortly after the special operation began over three years ago, Finland’s liberal-globalist elite fearmongered that their country might be next after Ukraine, which was the false pretext upon which they reversed their decades-long stance towards formal NATO membership. Far from joining out of sincere concerns for their security, they did so solely to expand NATO’s border with Russia, which could then be presented as a symbolic Western victory no matter the outcome of this ongoing proxy war. Here are three background briefings about this to bring unaware readers up to speed: