Neutrality in geopolitics commended itself to Finns only so long as it appeared to offer assurance of independence and security. Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine made them, regardless of where they were on the political spectrum, decide that a new military guarantee was vitally necessary. …

Last week NATO welcomed the Finns into its membership. It is a massive geostrategic upset for Russia because Putin and his coterie have always described NATO expansion as their ultimate fear — and they wrongly blamed America for having taken a cattle prod to herd ex-communist countries in Eastern and east-central Europe into the alliance. The truth is that those countries had a justifiable fear of Russia’s pretensions even in the 1990s and early 2000s when the Kremlin sought a cooperative symbiosis with the West. …

The news of Sweden’s application was bad enough, even though Turkey has as yet balked at its acceptance. But the Finnish border touches the homeland, running across 800 miles from the Barents Sea down to the Gulf of Finland. By barking out orders for the occupation of Kyiv, Putin has engineered an outcome worse for the Russian security cause than anything that he might have obtained by peaceful means. His war has brought about both the de-Finlandization of Finland and the end of any likelihood that Ukraine will consent to its own Finlandization in any strong variant.

[No matter what happens, Putin’s war has massively backfired on Russia. NATO’s borders now come within 100 miles of the vital naval port in Murmansk, not to mention a closer proximity to St. Petersburg. Russia has lost its energy-based influence in Europe. Its economy is collapsing and the impact of the potential fertility lost as hundreds of thousands of young men getting killed will last for generations. Even an outright conquest of Ukraine now would never compensate for these losses, especially because the Ukrainians would fight partisan wars for decades afterward. Putin has been an absolute catastrophe for Russia. — Ed]