Wednesday, November 22, 2023

NATO Is Conspiring To Place More Pressure On Russia Along The Bloc’s New Finnish Member’s Frontier

Finland Is Hellbent On Positioning Itself As A Frontline NATO State Against Russia



Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said on Monday that his country will respond in accordance with its national interests if Finland closes the entirety of their joint border like the Finnish Interior Minister threatened to do last week. 

In the intervening days, the EU said that it’s ready to send forces to that frontier, Finland gassed a group of border crossers, and it also deployed soldiers there too. Taken together, Finland is clearly hellbent on positioning itself as a frontline NATO state against Russia.


The latest dynamics suggest that NATO is conspiring to place more pressure on Russia along the bloc’s new Finnish member’s frontier, which is intended to provoke reciprocal military moves that can then be decontextualized as so-called “unprovoked aggression” for justifying a self-sustaining cycle of escalation. 

It’s unclear how far and fast everything can move, but this seems to be the intent, which importantly comes amidst the bloc rethinking its proxy war on Russia through Ukraine.

Granted, the “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) between NATO and Russia places very real limits on how much pressure can be exerted along this newfound front, but still opening it might be deemed by the bloc’s decisionmakers to be better than keeping it closed in that scenario. In other words, “where one door closes, another opens”, or to be more direct, the end of NATO’s proxy war on Russia via Ukraine could lead to the opening of a less high-stakes but still destabilizing front in Finland.


The case can thus be made that NATO has concluded that its hegemonic zero-sum interests are best advanced by opening up a “controlled” Finnish front against Russia, which could compensate for the partial closing of the Ukrainian one and push the bloc’s Arctic interests at the same time. For these reasons, Russian-Finnish tensions are expected to further worsen, and all moves that Russia makes in defense of its legitimate interests will be spun as “unprovoked aggression” to speed up these processes.






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