How Finland could tilt the balance against Putin

Now, the very Western alliance of democracies that Putin has turned into his rhetorical enemy will likely be expanding both its territory and muscle. With Turkey buttressing NATO’s south and the Baltic states taking up the middle of the eastern lines of the alliance, Finland and Sweden’s NATO presence in the north would signal precisely the sort of grand alliance Putin and other nationalists have been fearing. “Their membership would fundamentally change the Northern European security landscape for sure,” said Sean Monaghan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

For Russia—which, for most of the past century, has pressured Finland into taking a nonthreatening posture—no outcome could be more devastating, except perhaps the very defeat in Ukraine Putin is now trying to avoid, experts said. Helsinki sits less than 200 miles from Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, and Finland’s NATO membership would deliver “poetic justice” to him if this whole conflict “allegedly was about preventing Ukraine from joining NATO and shutting NATO’s open-door policy,” Monaghan said.

“It pushes him further into a corner,” said James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat now at the Rand Corporation. “If he wins in Ukraine but loses Finland, he comes out of this without having gained much. If he loses both, which is more likely, then he’s compounded his problem and the sort of nightmare scenario of an overriding NATO right on Russia’s border.” Finland’s 830-mile border with Russia would double NATO’s border against Moscow, amounting to the longest potential front between the European Union and Russia. “It’s a new problem not just in a military sense but in a cultural and economic sense,” Dobbins said.