Finland will become the 31st member of NATO: Turkey which, for months, did not want to approve the Nordic country’s request, has now voted in favor of joining the defensive alliance. Finland will be now formally admitted to NATO at its next summitwhich will be held in Lithuania in July: it had decided to abandon its historic neutrality and had asked to be able to join NATO in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (with which it shares a border of 1,340 kilometers, along which is building a fence wall).
Turkey was the last of the alliance’s 30 members to ratify membership (everyone must agree) with claims that Finland supported terrorists, but earlier this month Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan explained that the Scandinavian country has taken concrete steps (“authentic passages”) to repress the groups that Ankara sees as “terrorists”. Sweden, which applied to join NATO at the same time as Finland last May, is still blocked by Ankara for the same reason: Erdogan believes the country is protecting Kurdish militants and allowing them to demonstrate in the streets of Stockholm.
After the Turkish vote, the Finnish government has said that joining the alliance will strengthen national security and improve stability and security. «As allies, we will give and receive security. We will defend each other. Finland stands by Sweden now and in the future and supports its candidacy,” Prime Minister Sanna Marin wrote on Twitter.
One of the founding principles of NATO is that of collective defense: the attack on a member nation of the alliance is perceived as an aggression on all the countries that are part of it.
For the Russian president Vladimir PutinFinland’s accession represents a major setback: by sending its army to Ukraine, he hoped to curb NATO expansion and to weaken the West. But he got the exact opposite. Finland will be the seventh country born on the Baltic Sea: Russia’s coastal access to St. Petersburg and its small exclave of Kaliningrad will become even more isolated.
The Russian Foreign Ministry had previously condemned Finland’s decision, calling it reckless and based on Russophobic hysteria. But Finnish public opinion has changed radically, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine: in a few days, last spring, support for NATO membership increased from a third of Finns to almost 80%.
Source: Vanity Fair
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