Yesterday Finland officially decided to join NATO.
For now, it’s a decision made by an executive authority, and Parliament has to approve it,
but there is no doubt it’s going to happen – Finland will apply in the weeks to come.
As well as Sweden.
Then their entrance should be approved by other members of the alliance.
This process might take several months.
There are doubts about Hungary and Turkey, but it looks like their resistance, if it happens, is quite manageable.
What does it mean if those countries enter NATO?
The land border between Russia and the Alliance will be twice longer – now it’s 1,200 km, and it will become 2,500 km.
NATO will be able to set up military bases on the Finnish Aland Islands and the Swedish Gotland Island.
After that the Russian Baltic Fleet will be just a pile of scrap metal.
The only thing it can be used for is naval parades.
And the main issue – the border with NATO is not only getting longer, it’s getting closer.
It’s a bit more than 100 km in a straight line from the suburbs of St. Petersburg to Finland.
The flying time of missiles (which Putin is so worried about) to his native northern capital of Russia is less than a minute.
The overall GDP of the North Atlantic Alliance will increase by 800 billion dollars – it’s almost a half of the Russian economy.
The reason why the Finns and the Swedes made such a decision is obvious.
When Russia attacked Ukraine, it created risks for all the neighbors because the former world order doesn’t exist anymore.
Ukraine’s example shows that the West is ready to help with weapons and equipment but not immediately
and only if you show you are ready to fight till the end and die in the last ditch for your land.
Finland would find it harder to resist the aggressor than it is for Ukraine.
Its population is 8 times less than Ukraine's population,
and in peace time the army is just 12,000 of career officers and 22,000 of conscripts.
And the famous Mannerheim line – or what’s left of it – is on the territory of Russia these days.
So, Putin’s decision to stop the enlargement of NATO to the east by attacking Ukraine
will lead to its enlargement to the North.
Well, this is a spectacular geopolitical win of a great geopolitical strategist!
This is not what the propagandists or Lavrov are talking about.
And Putin himself is not saying anything like Finland is a non-existent state made up by Lenin.
According to his logic, he should immediately withdraw the troops from Donbas and send them to denazify Finland.
Because Ukraine’s entrance into the North Atlantic Alliance is a possible perspective of the next decade.
And Finland, another close neighbor of ours, will be there this year.
But in fact, everybody understands it perfectly well – NATO is not a problem.
Since 2004 NATO has been close to the Russian border – in the Baltic states.
After that all the talks about missiles flying time lost any sense.
All the tales about nasty NATO members who are plotting to attack us and take away our resources
is just a fairy-tale for people in Russia.
It’s quite obvious now when the whole battle worthy army is busy attacking the town of Popasna,
and still NATO didn’t use this opportunity to attack Moscow.
But the most extraordinary fact is that Putin’s long-standing aggressive anti-western policy helped the Alliance most of all –
it survived and got a new purpose for living.
What was NATO in 2011?
It was a shabby heritage of the cold war with no clear purpose.
I told you before – a military (non-economic) alliance is not really valuable.
It doesn’t make its members richer – it makes them poorer.
By 2011 NATO included 28 countries, now it’s 30.
And all those countries have to provide for thousands of bureaucrats sitting in the headquarters in Brussels which the employees of Microsoft could envy.
These countries should fulfill the norms for military budgets, spend money for collective training sessions,
buy modern equipment and weapons.
And what for?
We'll talk about it and the Reinaissance of the Alliance soon. And now, the ad.
Let's continue.
Actually, people need the defense alliance to defend themselves from someone.
Naturally, when 20 years passed since the death of the USSR,
many NATO members started talking about its reformatting or closing down.
Yes, there are some global threats, of course – international terrorism, Iran, or North Korea.
But when on one side there are some Arabs with handmade bombs and a bunch of outcast countries with half-dead economies,
and on the other – an alliance with a gigantic military and political potential of the mankind –
well, it’s a joke and not a real confrontation.
How could you explain to the voter in the Netherlands why his taxes are spent for a military alliance working for no use?
How could you explain to the voter in Denmark why he needs to spend 800 dollars a year (including babies and elderly people) for the army?
And whom are they going to fight when they live in the most peaceful region in the world?
Putin and people close to him like to speculate about how the vile West tore the USSR in pieces.
But in reality, no one is sadder about the USSR death than the organizations which lived on the conflict with it.
For the western intelligence agencies, Pentagon, US arms industry and the allies, and NATO –
for them the USSR collapse and the Warsaw Treaty meant decline, downsizing and impoverishment.
There are loads of examples in Wikipedia when countries spent billions of dollars for the development of modern armaments and those projects just died together with the red peril –
some of them died in drafts, some on the testing stage,
for some weapons they planned to buy thousands and bought dozens instead.
As of 2011, it's unclear why they needed NATO at all?
The only prophets in NATO were the former USSR members in the Baltics which
were quite right – as it turned out later – feeling a threat to their independence from the USSR successor – Russia.
But then their fear – both inside and outside Russia – looked ridiculous and the invasive war in Europe seemed almost impossible.
It’s unlikely we would have seen the death of NATO by 2022.
It’s extremely hard to destroy bureaucracy, especially an international one.
They like their stable life and nice salary, they like reporting to no one and having no responsibility.
They can defend their interests, workplaces and budgets which have lost their sense.
Most likely, the NATO bureaucracy would be close to anabiosis – when it exists but everybody forgot what for.
But Vladimir Putin arranged a Renaissance not only for NATO but for the whole western military complex –
from the defense agencies to the defense industry.
This Renaissance started in 2014 when for the first time after World War II the European order was put in question.
And, of course, it blossomed in 2022 when this order collapsed.
Now, the countries which have always been firm and neutral even during the coldest times of the cold war – like Finland – are knocking on NATO's door.
And it won’t be soon when some western politician risks his career and mentions something about NATO’s reform,
closing it down or downsizing its huge military budget.
In 2022 you can’t give any economic advice to almost anyone except for one category of workers.
If you are working in one of NATO’s structures, or working for a western defense plant,
or you are working in any sphere related to defense and security in the US and Europe,
you can forget about any crisis and stop reading news at all – you can take out a loan for a house and start a family.
While Putin is in power and 30 years after him, people will cut down their expenses for food or heating, but not for you.
This cold war infrastructure which should have been eaten with rust by now or crumbled like an old road,
resurrected and is shining like a new coin now, even better than before.
Russia became a threat to the world once again.
And even worse than the Soviet threat.
The USSR didn't start any big frontal wars in Europe.
Still, we can’t say that everything started in 2014.
The first and truly disturbing sign was 6 years before that when Putin, in some regular diplomatic session – the Munich Security Conference –
suddenly severely criticized the USA and NATO and accused them of building up a one-polar world.
Putin stated that Russia – a country with a thousand-year history – has always had the privilege to pursue an independent external policy and it won’t refuse from this privilege now.
And the first armed conflict of Russia with the former Soviet republic was not the Crimea annexation or the war in Donbas.
It’s the events in Georgia in the August of 2008.
I won’t go into details about who was responsible for starting that war.
Other things matter here.
It was Russia who supported separatists’ regimes in Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia,
issued Russian passports to the local citizens to justify its actions later with the need to protect Russian citizens.
The war with Georgia was a direct consequence of the Rose Revolution when Mikhail Saakashvili came to power,
who became a personal enemy of the Russian president.
Like it’s been with the Ukrainian Maidan in 2004, Putin thought that Georgian revolution was started by the Americans
to interfere with the processes on the former USSR territories which Putin considered and still considers his personal estate.
And nobody wanted that.
Recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia had one more goal (except for punishing Saakashvili) –
to create a territorial problem for Georgia and prevent it from joining the EU and NATO.
In that case this local conflict would become a conflict between Russia and NATO with all that it entails.
And nobody wanted that.
Georgia became a trial balloon for Putin –
how you could restrain the former soviet republic from European and North Atlantic integration.
Six years after that the same method was used for Ukraine.
In the light of all that happened – that Putin managed to make the border between Russia and NATO longer,
recreate the Alliance's former greatness and become its true enemy – we should remember the following.
This whole conflict between Russia and NATO before February 24, 2022, is pure fiction,
fiction from the beginning till the end with no word of truth.
It’s a fiction they created themselves, fed it to their propaganda and even started believing in it with time.
It’s a fiction like the talks about the missiles flying time.
No country-member of NATO or the alliance itself would ever be that crazy to start a frontal invasive war against a nuclear state,
even if the flying time was short enough to reach the Kremlin from a kid's slingshot.
From this point of view the current war contradicts all Putin’s fantasies in a most paradoxical way.
And at the same time, it makes his fantasies more real.
On one hand, nobody is going to attack Russia even in such a perfect situation.
It’s a moment when all battle worthy troops are drawn to Ukraine from everywhere, starting from the Far East.
It’s a moment when the newest pieces of machinery are damaged in the battles and Russia has to use Soviet machinery from the stocks.
It’s a moment when Russia could respond just with nuclear weapons and nothing more for any invasion – whether it’s China, or Estonia.
Even in a moment like this when you can come and take half of the country,
and no one would greet you except for some frightened conscripts on the old tin can – nobody comes.
Like they didn’t come 30 years ago after the USSR collapse
when the situation was so desperate that the Russian army ate humanitarian help from the US and Germany for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
When there was a real chance of hunger, and they could set any condition – even demand nuclear disarmament.
By the way, the US did set such a condition for many former USSR republics.
Just because of the US all nuclear weapons are in Russia now, and Ukraine is not a nuclear state.
On the other hand, Vladimir Putin managed to bring a disaster.
Twenty years of unreal confrontation with NATO became real in one day.
It doesn’t mean that there is a threat of war between Russia and NATO.
But it means that NATO will make a special effort to stop Russia from being a threat to its neighbors.
And for all the neighbors, except for China, probably, the question of joining NATO will be limited just by the wish of the Alliance to approve their entrance.
It's very bad news.
Because unlike some other things, this tendency will outlive Vladimir Putin.
All the politicians in the world like threats – threats and defense are successfully sold to the voters,
you can take a lot of power and budget for it, it’s a good thing to be reelected with.
For a long time, Russia has been holding its hand raised from the back of the classroom – look at me, I’m a threat!
But there were Islamic terrorists or North Korea and Iran in front of us, and nobody paid any attention to Russia.
And it doesn't look like a threat, in fact.
It looks more like a usual European country.
From the outside.
But now it has changed.
Now they pay attention to Russia.
And many years will pass after Putin, when common American, Australian or Spanish voters will not consider patching things up with Russia
or at least removing significant economic restrictions which prevents it from developing its defense industry,
the same as making peace with Al-Qaeda.
We can solve a lot of problems right after Putin goes away.
But we will bequeath this one to our grandchildren.
Till tomorrow!