PRAGUE, June 5. /TASS/. Sweden’s and Finland’s NATO membership both countries aspire will not give them lasting security, the Czech Republic’s former deputy foreign minister, Petr Drulak, said in a commentary uploaded to the website of the daily Mlada fronta dnes on Sunday.

"By joining the North Atlantic Alliance, both countries (Sweden and Finland - TASS) can lull their security concerns, but in the long run this step will not benefit their security. In the meantime, neutrality did work for them," he said. "Finland’s neutrality during the Cold War helped achieve prosperity and safety, despite its ostensibly insecure position between the Soviet Union and NATO. And Sweden experienced no major European conflicts for the past two centuries."

Stockholm and Helsinki, if they join NATO, will significantly harm relations with Russia, Drulak predicts. Also, he warns that tensions in the Baltic Sea region will soar.

"If Finland and Sweden join NATO, the militarization of the Baltic region and the risk of clashes [with Russia] will increase. Russia will put both states on the list of its enemies. At the same time, they have already been on the US list of friends all along. They can move up slightly on this list [of friends of the United States], but whether the US will honor its security guarantees will always depend on [international] circumstances. And these (circumstances - TASS) in the coming decades will be determined by US priority interests in the Pacific, and by no means in the Baltic Sea," the expert predicts.

The ambassadors of Finland and Sweden to NATO, Klaus Korhonen and Axel Wernhoff, on May 18 presented to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg their countries’ applications for the alliance’s membership. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on the same day that Ankara would not support the admission of Sweden and Finland to NATO until they determined their attitude towards terrorist organizations, in particular, the PKK, which Turkey regards as such. On May 21, Erdogan said that Turkey would support both countries’ NATO membership bids on the condition they demonstrated solidarity with Ankara over its security concerns. The Turkish leader also remarked that his country’s delegations’ meetings with Finnish and Swedish officials had fallen short of the original expectations.