With the now official entry of the FinlandToday NATO makes 31. When Sweden too overcomes Turkish opposition, the Alliance will include 32 countries, but already today this enlargement is a severe blow for Russia, which acquires a new very long border with NATO and loses part of its strategic superiority in the great North Arctic.
For Moscow this is one deadweight losswhich forces her to one defensive lineup much more complex and dispersed than in the past. Luckily for him, whatever Vladimir Putin says, NATO is a strictly defensive allianceotherwise, he would have put his country in dire straits.
Putin’s aggression against Ukraine had been motivated in part by the desire to push the Atlantic Alliance further west, to remove it from Russian territory. And yet now the Russian president achieved exactly the opposite, greatly increasing the direct contact between the two sides. And that’s not enough, because this absurd war he so strongly desired is even making the old promise that the United States had initially managed to wrest from the allies, of welcome entry into NATO of Ukraine and Georgia: a promise that until last year the Europeans had successfully managed to freeze, but which could now become topical again.
The major change concerns theRussia’s access to the sea, especially in the Atlantic. The Baltic was until yesterday shared between NATO countries, neutral countries and Russia, and therefore had a rather neutral sizein which no one exercised a clear superiority, even if the entry into NATO of the three Baltic republics (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) which the USSR had illegally annexed at the end of World War II, had isolated the important Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Now however, especially if, as is probable, the Sweden will also enter NATO, this sea will be much more controlled in its entirety by the Alliance, leaving Russia with only very limited room for manoeuvre.
In reality, the Russian fleet had already been arriving at the Atlantic from the ports of the for some time north arctic. But even in this case, the entry of Finland makes these regions much more exposed to close surveillance by NATO. In other words, the Russian naval forces will be much less free than before and much more exposed even at their bases.
Paradoxically, all of this could make the naval bases in the Black Sea more important for Moscow, especially if the Türkiye continues to maintain an ambiguous attitude towards the Alliance and if Russian influence in the Middle East and Africa were to increase, making the Mediterranean less “Western”. However, the aggression against Ukraine has called into question Russia’s control of Crimea (illegally annexed after the 2014 coup). Today as it is today, it is perhaps also in the future, so even these foundations are far from peaceful.
However one decides to analyze the question, Putin’s decision to sow wind, by attacking Ukraine, has for the moment been resolved in a storm that primarily damages Moscow. Putin can only hope that his people don’t notice.
Cover photo EPA/JOHANNA GERON / POOL
This article was also published by the Quotidiano del Sud