FINLAND HAS BECOME the 31st member of Nato, wrapping up its historic strategic shift with the deposit of its accession documents to the alliance.
“With receipt of this instrument of accession, we can now declare that Finland is the 31st member of the North Atlantic Treaty,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the official keeper of the treaty, said.
Last year, the Kremlin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine upended Europe’s security landscape and prompted Finland – and its neighbour Sweden – to drop decades of non-alignment.
Awkward allies Turkey and Hungary, for different reasons of their own, delayed Finland’s bid to come under the Nato umbrella – and Stockholm’s progress remains blocked.
But last week, the Turkish parliament voted to clear Finland’s last hurdle.
The Kremlin today branded Finland’s Nato membership an “assault on our security” and said it represented “the latest aggravation of the situation”.
“The expansion of Nato is an assault on our security and Russia’s national interests,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“And this forces us to take countermeasures… in tactical and strategic terms.”
Peskov did not provide further details.
Completing the ratification in well under a year still makes this the fastest membership process in the alliance’s recent history.
All that remain are today’s highly choreographed formalities at Nato headquarters.
Finland’s foreign minister will hand over the formal accession papers to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the keeper of Nato’s founding treaty.
Then the country’s blue-and-white flag will be raised next to those of its new allies, between those of Estonia and France, in front of the gleaming headquarters in Brussels.
“This is really an historic day. It’s a great day for the alliance,” Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg said.
Joining Nato places Finland under the alliance’s Article Five, the collective defence pledge that an attack on one member “shall be considered an attack against them all”.
This was the guarantee Finnish leaders decided they needed as they watched Russian President Vladimir Putin’s devastating assault lay waste to swathes of Ukraine.
“President Putin went to war against Ukraine with a clear aim to get less Nato,” Stoltenberg said. “He’s getting the exact opposite.”
“President Putin wanted to slam Nato’s door shut. Today we show the world that he failed, that aggression and intimidation do not work.”
Invaded by its giant neighbour the Soviet Union in 1939, Finland – which has a 1,300-kilometre border with Russia – stayed out of NATO throughout the Cold War.
Now its membership brings a potent military into the alliance with a wartime strength of 280,000 and one of Europe’s largest artillery arsenals.
And its strategic location bolsters Nato’s defences on a border running from the vulnerable Baltic states to the increasingly competitive Arctic.
Nato was created as a counterweight to the Soviet Union at the onset of the Cold War era that began immediately after the Allies defeated Nazi Germany.
The bloc has gone through waves of expansion that brought it ever closer to Russia’s borders.
Nato’s reach into eastern and southern European countries that were once under Moscow’s effective control infuriated the Kremlin and strained its relations with Washington.
Putin cited the threat of Nato expanding into Ukraine as one of his main reasons for launching the war 13 months ago.
At first, the Kremlin appeared to play down the significance of the alliance’s border advancing to touch a new stretch of Russia’s northwestern frontier.
But the Kremlin today branded Finland’s Nato membership an “assault on our security”.
Finland’s arrival nevertheless remains a bittersweet moment for the alliance as the hope had been for Sweden to come on board at the same time.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak today hailed Finland’s “historic” accession to Nato and urged the alliance to admit Sweden next, after its entry was blocked by Hungary and Turkey.
“All NATO members now need to take the steps necessary to admit Sweden too, so we can stand together as one Alliance to defend freedom in Europe and across the world,” Sunak said in a statement.
Budapest and Ankara remain the holdouts after belatedly agreeing to wave through Helsinki’s bid.
Sweden has upset Hungary’s leader Viktor Orban – one of Putin’s closest allies in Europe – by expressing alarm over the rule of law in Hungary.
It has also angered Turkey by refusing to extradite dozens of suspects that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan links to a failed 2016 coup attempt and a decades-long Kurdish independence struggle.
Nato diplomats hope Erdogan will become more amenable if he weathers elections in May and that Sweden will join before a Nato summit in Vilnius this July.
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