A NATO official told AFP on Tuesday that the alliance has no plans to send troops to Sweden and Finland if they complete their membership process, which officially started this week.
“We don’t plan to have an additional presence in either country, they have formidable national forces. They’re capable of defending themselves,” NATO Deputy Secretary-General Mircea Geoana said.
“We don’t plan to have NATO bases in these two countries, because they have a very high level of military and strategic maturity,” Geoana added.
Russian officials have said they don’t view Finland and Sweden joining NATO as much of a threat as Ukraine joining the alliance. But Moscow has made clear it would respond to the expansion of NATO military infrastructure.
“We don’t have problems with Sweden and Finland as we do with Ukraine,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week. “If Finland and Sweden wish to, they can join. That’s up to them. They can join whatever they want.”
But Putin warned that “if military contingents and military infrastructure were deployed there, we would be obliged to respond symmetrically and raise the same threats for those territories where threats have arisen for us.”
Finland shares an over 800-mile border with Russia, and if NATO equipment is deployed there, Russia could respond by strengthening its border or its forces in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea. NATO could always change its mind too and end up sending troops to Sweden and Finland in the future.
While NATO officials are hoping for a speedy application process, Turkey could still block Sweden and Finland from joining the alliance. Legislatures from all 30 NATO member states now need to approve their applications, and the Turkish parliament could say no if the Nordic nations don’t live up to an agreement they signed with Turkey last week.
Fins in NATO fry them like beacon!
Does NATO have any credibility at all?
If they have high level of military why then they want to join NATO…?!!!
Of course! Not ONE more inch!
“We don’t plan to have an additional presence in either country, they have formidable national forces.”
Politicians and top officers can never tell the truth. The social democrats eliminated Sweden’s military. Cutting it in half and then cutting it in half again, and then eliminating military service in 2010 to leave only officers.
That last part was, quietly, because the vast number of immigrants made military service impossible. The officers had practically no means of making them follow orders; if they left for a day all that happened was they’d lose a day’s pay, and the pay was just a symbolic few dollars per day. So Arabs, Kurds, Afghans and Somalis, some of which didn’t even bother to learn the language, and none of which cared about Sweden’s defense, would just do whatever they wanted. Vandalism rose and Swedish youth were harrassed, as there would never be any repercussions, just like in the school system. Many officers threatened to quit unless they got the means to maintain order, which was refused. And the social democrats, the communist party and the greens hated the thought of the military anyway, since having a military is fascism.
Then suddenly when conservative Russia is the target, the military is great and the social democrats decide in a matter of weeks to join NATO, after generations of speeches and essays about the importance of neutrality. Of course, that was when the communist Soviet Union was the enemy, which most on the Left admired either secretly or openly.