As of this Tuesday, NATO will have a new member state, for a total of 31 allies. The Foreign Ministers of the Atlantic Alliance will hold the finland entry with a flag-raising ceremony at the headquarters in Brussels. An accession that has been completed after Turkey lifted its veto, which it has not done with Sweden, which for now will have to wait. “Putin wanted less NATO and has achieved the opposite,” said his secretary general on Monday, Jens Stoltenberg.
Finland and Sweden jointly submitted their application to join NATO in May 2022 (abandoning their traditional neutrality) in response to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which led them to rethink their security. The petition was approved a month later at the Madrid summit, but the Turkish president, Recep Tayipp Erdoğanstopped the ratification on the grounds that the two countries provided cover for Kurdish activists that Ankara considers terrorists.
Some reservations that have been resolved in the case of Finland (whose accession was ratified by the Turkish Parliament last week and will be officially notified to NATO this Tuesday, thus concluding the entire process), but not with Sweden. The Secretary General has assured that his priority is that Stockholm can also join “as soon as possible”but has denied that this delay could affect its security.
[Turquía ratifica el ingreso de Finlandia a la OTAN]
“The impression that Sweden is being left alone is not correct. No, Sweden is already very integrated in NATO, in its civil and military structures. The allies are ready to act and it is inconceivable that threats or attacks against Sweden would occur without NATO reacting, and even less with Finland as a full member,” Stoltenberg warned at a press conference.
What does Finland’s entry into NATO bring? “First of all, Finland contributes to NATO significant, well-trained and equipped military forces, with a large reserve army. And now with an investment in advanced and modern fifth-generation F-35 fighters, (since it has bought) more than 60,” said the Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance.
Added to this is the fact that Finland “has a long border (more than 1,300 kilometers) with Russia, so when Finland enters, the land border between NATO and Russia will more than double.” “President Putin went to war against Ukraine with the clear goal of having less NATO“, Stoltenberg stressed.
“He wanted NATO to withdraw its structures and its forces from all the allies that entered after 1997, that is, all the Eastern and Central European allies. And he wanted NATO to close its door to new members,” he stressed. Stoltenberg. It is achieving the opposite. It has achieved more NATO presence on its Eastern flank and has gained two new members, with Finland and Sweden.
Will Ukraine be the next country to join NATO, as its president Volodimir Zelensky has requested? Stoltenberg has thrown the balls out: he asserts that the position of the Alliance “has not changed” and that kyiv will one day become a member. But he insists that the most urgent thing now is to give military support to Ukraine so that “prevail as a sovereign and independent nation in Europe”.
In fact, the NATO foreign ministers will try to define a “multi-year plan” of support for kyiv at their meeting this Tuesday and Wednesday in Brussels. “We don’t know when this war will end. But when it does, we will have to establish agreements so that Ukraine can deter future aggression and that history does not repeat itself. We cannot allow Russia to continue undermining European security,” Stoltenberg argues. NATO military aid to kyiv already amounts to 65 billion euros.
The Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance has again condemned Vladimir Putin’s “nuclear rhetoric” and his threat to position tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, but has said he has so far seen no changes on the ground that would require a response from from NATO. Stoltenberg has also called on China not to send weapons to Moscow, a move he said would be a “big mistake.”
