Russian Aggression Prompts Finnish-Swedish Military Pact

Finland and Sweden are looking into pooling their defense resources as the crisis in Ukraine shifts the Nordic states’ military-policy focus to protecting their home turf from participating in international peacekeeping.

The countries yesterday agreed to conduct a study by October to find ways to ensure that money spent on arms will stretch a longer way. Cooperation will begin next year with a focus on 2016 and beyond, according to Finnish Defense Minister Carl Haglund and his Swedish counterpart Karin Enstroem.Finland and Sweden aren’t members of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, though they joined the European Union in 1995. Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border with Russia - - more than the other 27 EU members combined -- and fought two wars against the Soviet Union during World War II. Popular opposition has stopped the two countries from joining NATO.“We have a neighbor who has demonstrated a couple of times in the past six years that military power and the threat of using it are simply instruments in the political toolbox,” Charly Salonius-Pasternak, security policy researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, said by phone yesterday. “For a small nation, this is a terrifying idea.”

Strategic Blow

Popular opposition to joining NATO has centered on the belief that Russia is becoming slowly more democratic and that economic ties will keep conflicts from escalating, Salonius-Pasternak said. That argument has now “received a strategic blow.”According to NATO, Russia has amassed about 40,000 troops along the Ukrainian border since annexing Crimea in March, prompting the worst standoff with the U.S. and the EU since the Cold War.Developments in the crisis in the past few days are “highly alarming,” the government in Helsinki said in a statement today. It urged parties to refrain from rhetoric and measures, which would escalate the crisis further.Finland sells about 10 percent of all exported goods in Russia, its biggest trade partner. More than 80 percent of Finland’s imports from its eastern neighbor are energy products, including 100 percent of natural gas used in Finland, according to data by the customs office.

The defense cooperation announced yesterday is limited to peacetime, according to the ministers. Still, it also implies improving potential war-time capabilities, Salonius-Pasternak said. “No reasonable politician can any longer say that the situation is as before and that Russia’s increasing military might poses no problems,” he said.


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-06/russian-aggression-prompts-finnish-swedish-military-pact.html