MOSCOW, April 4. /TASS/. Russia will have to take response measures following Finland’s accession to NATO and increase its military presence, a senior Russian lawmaker said on Tuesday.
"Will Finland’s security be enhanced? Definitely not. They understand that Russia will have to take response measures and expand its military presence. ‘Will have to’ means that it was not planned and there was no threat," deputy speaker of Russia’s Federation Council (upper parliament house), Konstantin Kosachev, wrote on his Telegram channel.
According to Kosachev, this will not add to Europe’s security, seeing as how a key cause of the conflict in Ukraine is linked with NATO. "Russia’s border with NATO will double, which will inevitably add to the risks of dangerous incidents. And these will not be Russian-Finnish incidents but rather causes for escalation between nuclear powers. As Bloomberg once said, the Finnish territory is a ‘strategic nightmare’ that would ‘dramatically increase the alliance's exposure to any future attacks by Moscow,’" he noted.
However, the situation will not change much from a practical point of view, since Finland became NATO’s official partner back in 1994 and took part in the alliance’s planning and analysis, in its munition purchase projects and so forth. "According to NATO experts, Finland used to be even more compatible with NATO than some of its actual members," he wrote.
He stressed that Finland had no grounds to feel threatened by Russia. "It did not practice genocide of Russians. It did not plan to seize Russian territories by force. It had no nuclear weapons or anything else that would raise concerns for Russia. Then why has Helsinki ‘imported’ a strategic threat? The reason is quite simple: to spite Russia. Public approval of this reckless act occurred amid a campaign of brewing anti-Russian sentiment," Kosachev emphasized.
However, in his words, there are more global reasons behind the Nordic countries’ NATO aspirations. "These tendencies (along with efforts to create NATO analogues in the Asia Pacific region) demonstrate that the West is consolidating amid the existential threats. As a matter of fact, amid the inevitable conflict with the global majority. And in this conflict, unlike the Ukrainian conflict, neutrality is inadmissible - the comfortable order serving the unjust unipolar world order is in jeopardy," he noted.
Finland’s accession to NATO once again proves Russia’s conclusions - "as long as NATO exists, there will be no peace either in Europe or the entire world," he stressed. "Finland’s admission to the bloc to spite Moscow only adds to Europe’s problems as it eliminates the last more or less neutral buffer zone between the West and Russia."
On Tuesday, NATO foreign ministers handed over to the United States documents on admitting Finland to the alliance as its 31st member nation.