No matter what Russia President Putin may try sell as a success in his grab for Ukraine?
He LOST two rounds….
Finland and Sweden who have beeen neutral countries bordering Russia…..
They ARE NOW NATO countries something Putin had NEVER wanted to happen after the Soviet Union ceased to exist …..
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago was an enormous shock to Europeans. Used to 30 years of post-Cold War peace, they had imagined European security would be built alongside a more democratic Russia, not reconstructed against a revisionist imperial war machine.
There was no bigger shock than in Finland, with its long border and historical tension with Russia, and in Sweden, which had dismantled 90 percent of its army and 70 percent of its air force and navy in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After the decision by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to try to destroy a sovereign neighbor, both Finland and Sweden rapidly decided to apply to join the NATO alliance, the only clear guarantee of collective defense against a newly aggressive and reckless Russia.
With Finland having joined last year, and the Hungarian Parliament finally approving Sweden’s application on Monday, Mr. Putin now finds himself faced with an enlarged and motivated NATO, one that is no longer dreaming of a permanent peace…
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With Sweden and Finland together in NATO, it will be much easier to bottle up the Russian surface navy in the Baltic Sea and to monitor the High North. Russia still has up to two-thirds of its second-strike nuclear weapons there, based on the Kola Peninsula.
So the new members will help provide enhanced monitoring of a crucial part of Russia’s military, said Niklas Granholm, the deputy director of studies at the Defense Research Agency.
Russia’s fleet in Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania, is only 200 miles away, and so are its Iskander nuclear-capable missiles. NATO planners have long worried about how to support the Baltic nations if Russia seized the 40-mile “Suwalki Gap” between Kaliningrad and Belarus, but Sweden’s position straddling both the North and Baltic Seas would make it much easier to send NATO reinforcements….
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For both Finland and Sweden, membership is the end of a long 30-year process of what Mr. Dalsjo called “our long goodbye to neutrality.” First came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decision to join the European Union, which meant dropping neutrality for what both countries called “military nonalignment.”
Sweden, which had quiet defense guarantees from the United States, gradually became more explicitly Atlanticist and integrated more and more with NATO, he said. “And now we take the final step.”…