An awkward silence on NATO’s newest border with Russia

On a recent afternoon along Finland’s border with Russia, an attack from Russian military bases a few miles away seemed a distant prospect.

That’s not just because Finland, as NATO’s newest member, now enjoys the guaranteed protection of 30 countries, including the United States – a development President Biden will celebrate next week when he visits Helsinki.

It’s also because most of the Russians who were once stationed in the area went to fight in Ukraine, and many if not most of them, Finnish officials say, are dead. It may take years for Russia to pose a conventional military threat from the verdant forest of pines, spruces and birches.

But some Russians could be seen on a sunny June day at the Vaalimaa border crossing, about halfway between Helsinki and St. Petersburg. A trickle came and went, many in expensive cars: an Audi Q7, a black BMW with two sleek bikes on a rack. These Russians were likely dual passport holders, possibly en route to other European countries that they can only reach by land due to flight restrictions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.

For anyone trying to cross the border illegally, Border Guard patrols run through the woods. But their sniffing dogs encounter few Russians trying to sneak into Finland.

“We do have a few Finns trying to sneak that way,” said Matti Pitkäniitty, a Finnish Border Guard officer who showed a visitor around the site, “but normally they are mentally ill.” Perhaps the biggest concern this afternoon was a black bear prowling the area.

The peaceful scene dispels many Finns’ fears that, despite Russia’s weakened state, this transit point and their country could one day become a Russian target. That fear led Finland last year to seek membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a process completed in April when Finland became its 31st member in what Mr. Biden calls a strategic blow to Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin.

That move brought a long, peaceful relationship between Moscow and Helsinki with sharp new tensions. In January, the Russian army announced plans to add a new army corps to the border region of Karelia.

And on Thursday, Russia’s foreign ministry said it would expel nine Finnish diplomats — revenge for Finland’s expulsion last month of nine Russian diplomats accused of being intelligence agents — and that it would close the Finnish consulate in St. Petersburg this fall. Close. A statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Finland’s membership of NATO and its support for Ukraine “represent a threat to the security of the Russian Federation” and amount to “clearly hostile actions”.

But Finnish officials say the only threat is Russia.

“The Finns think we could easily find ourselves in the position the Ukrainians are in,” said Pitkäniitty. He gestured to a road crossing the border through the woods and added: “If a Russian division wants to attack Helsinki, they have to go through this. You would see ruins and smoke here.

Such an attack would have far greater consequences now that Finland’s border – an 830-mile border running roughly north-south from the Barents Sea to the Gulf of Finland – has become a NATO border, more than doubling the existing borders of Russia with NATO countries. . According to the alliance’s charter, a Russian attack on Finland would be treated as an attack on all NATO members.

No one expects such an invasion anytime soon. But history understandably leaves Finland wary.

Engraved in the national memory of the country is the invasion of Joseph Stalin in 1939 and the conquest of thousands of square kilometers of Finnish territory that Russia still holds today. The Soviet leader felt that St. Petersburg needed a larger buffer area in the west for protection, so he forcibly created one, at the cost of many thousands of lives.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, many Finns returned to that dark chapter of their history.

“It was not difficult for Finns to put themselves in the shoes of the Ukrainians. They had walked in,” said Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken during a visit to Helsinki in early June. “For many Finns, the parallels between 1939 and 2022 were striking.”

For now, the NATO alliance has no plans to install infrastructure or station troops at the border, though its members are eager to learn more: US and European officials have visited to assess vulnerabilities and Finnish preparations.

The Finns say not to worry. On the one hand, they remember with pride the massive losses they inflicted on the invading Soviet forces in 1939—using insurgent ambush tactics against a poorly led and equipped enemy, just as the Ukrainians would do almost a century later. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, later said that while the Soviets had prevailed against the vastly outnumbered Finns, they had in fact been defeated, because “it encouraged the belief of our enemies that the Soviet Union was a behemoth was on feet of clay.”

Partly due to bitter memories of that conflict, the Finnish Border Guard also acts as a branch of its army. Members receive full military training and units are equipped with body armor and semi-automatic rifles, although a squad of three recently patrolling around Vaalimaa stowed away that equipment; the only visible enemies were constant swarms of mosquitoes.

However, in their current numbers, the border guards would be of little use against a Russian military attack. It’s one that Finland has almost literally paved the way for: a few years ago, Finland upgraded the highway between Helsinki and Vaalimaa to enable trade and travel between Finland and Russia, which has boomed over the past decade. to make.

But border traffic today is less than a third of prepandemic levels and the road is lightly traveled.

The strength of the NATO alliance and the Article 5 treaty mandating collective self-defense reduces fear of attack. “That’s the main reason we joined – to get the Article 5 coverage,” Brig. So said General Sami Nurmi, a Finnish defense policy official, in an interview in April. “And of course also that deterrent aspect.”

In the short term, the Finns are more concerned about a completely different form of warfare: armed migration. About 60 miles north of Vaalimaa, Finland has begun erecting its first border fence.

In late 2015 and early 2016, Finland experienced a wave of asylum seekers crossing the Russian border, most of them from third countries. Finnish officials saw the hand of Moscow, which has repeatedly diverted migrants to European countries in an apparent attempt to destabilize their politics.

“The impression that someone on the Russian side is organizing and arranging things is probably true,” Finland’s foreign minister, Timo Soini, told the country’s state broadcaster at the time. “It’s pretty clear that an activity like this is a managed effort.”

The Finns were taken by surprise. “Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined, for example, that we would see Bangladeshis on bicycles coming to a high northern border crossing when the sun doesn’t rise at all and it is minus 20-25 degrees Celsius,” says Pitkäniitty. said, or minus 4 to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit.

Despite that experience, Mr. Pitkäniitty said he and his colleagues maintain cordial and professional relations with their Russian counterparts across the border. The two sides communicate regularly, he said.

“When we talk to the Russians, we try to avoid politics,” said Pitkäniitty. “There is no point in arguing. You just end up in a dispute for which there are no solutions.”

For years, he said, fishing, hunting and sports were acceptable topics of conversation with the Russians. “Now we have to exclude sports, because they no longer participate in international sports,” said Pitkäniitty. “So it’s fishing and hunting that you can safely talk about with the Russian officers.”

At the same time, “I know they won’t hesitate to shoot me in the back if ordered to,” he added. “Just like I would do the same to them.”

John Ismay contributed reporting from Washington, DC