Finland to join NATO

Finland will officially join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Tuesday (April 4), Agence France-Presse said today.

Turkey says yes to Finland

Turkey formally withdrew its objection to Finland’s joining NATO when its parliament “approved” its application unanimously. Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO, announced Friday that Finland would join “in the coming days.” But today Stoltenberg definitely said,

Tomorrow we will welcome Finland as the 31^st member.

Finland and Sweden have both applied to join the thirty-member alliance. Sweden’s application remains “pending” at this time.

Newsweek reported yesterday that Russian state TV personalities openly speculated on another “special military operation” to “liberate” Finland. That country has an ethnic Russian population and for a century was once part of Russia in Czarist days. Russia literally took it away from Sweden in the Finnish War of 1808-9. Czar Aleksandr I developed the Grand Duchy (or Principality) of Finland as a semi-autonomous region. Aleksandr also made a key territorial concession to Finland: the Vyborg Governorate on the Karelian Isthmus. This would cause war more than a century later.

But with the Russian Revolution, that relationship ended. The Finns voted to secede, and Lenin, head of what had become the Soviet Union at the time, let them. But during the Great Patriotic (Second World) War, Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, repossesssed the Karelian Isthmus. The Finns allied with the Nazis to get it back. They failed. After the war, Finnish and Soviet leaders settled their differences.

But last summer the President of Finland said the trust between Russia and Finland no longer existed.

The Relationship Between Finland and Russia Is Worse Than During The Cold War.

Swedish resentment

That the Swedes should also be applying to join NATO is especially telling in this context. The Swedes regard their loss in the Finnish War as:

The greatest national catastrophe in the long history of the Swedish state.

This clearly indicates that Swedish resentment of Russia runs deep. Add to it Russian state anchor personalities calling for war to negate Finland’s joining of NATO, and the prospect for a Third World War just became significantly more likely.