Finland’s Foreign Affairs Minister Pekka Haavisto is concerned that his country’s application to join NATO will be delayed.
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Finland on Tuesday became an official member of the military alliance NATO, prompted by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine last year.
The Nordic nation is the 31st country to join the alliance, which vows in its treaty that an attack on one of its members is an attack on them all. It’s a historic moment for Finland, which has followed a path of neutrality for decades.
“Finland’s membership is not targeted against anyone. Nor does it change the foundations or objectives of Finland’s foreign and security policy,” Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said in a written statement Tuesday.
His comments came shortly after the country’s foreign affairs minister, Pekka Haavisto, handed over all the accession documents in Brussels, at NATO’s headquarters, in the presence of the group’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, and U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken.
Authorities in Helsinki decided that in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022, the country was no longer safe on its own and applied to join the alliance a few months later. Finland shares an 832-mile border with Russia, the longest of any European Union member. NATO’s border with Russia will roughly double in size after Finland’s accession.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that Russia would closely follow any NATO deployments in Finland and that his country would take “counter-measures” to this accession, according to Reuters.
What about Sweden?
Finland applied to become a member of NATO at the same time as Sweden. However, it is still unclear what the future holds for Stockholm.
Its decision to join the alliance also marked a watershed moment in the country’s history, given that it had followed an independent military policy for more than 200 years.
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