Finland Shifts Policy To Counter Moscow
BY THOMAS GROVE
ONTTOLA, Finland—Armed Finnish border guards on cross-country skis patrol the country’s eastern flank, NATO’s newest and longest border with its main adversary, Russia. Helicopters and drones buzz overhead along new fences being constructed— 13 feet high in places—with barbed wire on top and 24-hour electronic surveillance. The new measures are meant to protect Finland from increasingly aggressive Russian operations. Those have included waves of migrants, which Helsinki says have been sent by Moscow to overwhelm the country’s remote borders in recent months.
Finland believes the influx of migrants, which has continued even after it closed its border to Russia late last year, is part of the hybrid warfare Moscow is deploying to intimidate and test Finland’s security services after the Nordic country’s decision to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization last April. Since then, Russia has promised to re-establish Soviet military districts along the border. Some Finns also believe Moscow was behind the mysterious severing of a gas pipeline and a telecommunications cable in the Baltic Sea in October. And Finland is fending off cyberattacks and disinformation it says are being cooked up by Russia. “We have thought about peacetime and wartime as separate for decades,” said Jarno Limnell, a Finnish parliamentarian who has long warned about Russia’s threat to Finland. “The edges of those concepts are slowly be --coming blurred with shades of gray between peace and war. This is the new normal in living with Russia.”
Finland, which has an 830mile border with Russia, has for decades struck a delicate balance in its relations with its much larger neighbor. It has studiously avoided policies or actions that Russia could deem threatening, but has also prevented Moscow from getting too close. But with its accession to NATO, Finland has radically revised its Russia policy, re --framing Moscow as its main adversary. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Finland has ramped up its military spending, boosting its defense budget to above 2% and snap --ping up U.S. rocket sys --tems, as well as Israeli anti --tank and air-defense systems. The country is preparing to base F-35 jet fighters it will receive from the U.S. just over 100 miles from its border with Russia.
The shift in its Russia pol --icy was further illustrated in March when President Sauli Niinisto stepped down after two six-year terms. New Presi --dent Alexander Stubb has sig --naled openness to removing a longstanding Finnish prohibition on transporting nuclear weapons over its territory, as the country fully embraces new NATO membership and
its nuclear deterrent.
“Now we have a hostile relationship with Russia, and that is a big risk, maybe not in the short term but in the long run,” said Heikki Talvitie, a longtime diplomat who served as ambassador to Moscow at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and was awarded an Order of Friendship medal by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2014. “Things have changed now, it’s existential.”
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Finland has an 830-mile border with Russia. JUUSO WESTERLUND/ INSTITUTE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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