As of this Tuesday, NATO welcomes its 31st member state, with the accession of Finland, less than a year after formalizing the request. On arrival at the ceremony, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg emphasized the security guarantees now being given to the Scandinavian country.
On the day that also marks the 74th anniversary of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, Stoltenberg classified it as “historic” as the organization continues to increase its membership and welcomed what he believed was the best response to those seeking to weaken the alliance.
“It shows that when President Putin had as his stated goal that the invasion of Ukraine was to guarantee less NATO on his borders, he wanted to close the doors of NATO, to end NATO memberships of any other European country, he gets the exact opposite,” he said.
Stoltenberg admits that the end of more than seven decades of neutrality in Finland “seemed unthinkable a few years ago”. For that reason, he has no hesitation in classifying the day as “truly historic” now that Finland is a “full member of the alliance”.
The Helsinki government will from now on have a place in the decisions of the Atlantic alliance and the country involved in all of the organization’s events. But Stoltenberg believes there is an even more relevant fact. “Finland will receive a rock-solid security guarantee: Article 5, our collective defense clause, all for one, will apply to Finland from now on,” he stressed.
With 1340 kilometers of the Russian-Finnish border, the arrival of the 31st allied state almost triples the land contact between NATO and Russia. Jens Stoltenberg does not rule out a military presence in Finland, as long as the country’s authorities request it. “It is up to Finland to decide whether it wants to be present in any way. But there will be no NATO troops in Finland without Finland’s consent,” Stoltenberg said.
For now, the Helsinki government says “the first step is to finalize membership” and assert itself as “an active member of NATO”. But that will be a discussion for later.
As the Secretary General of NATO noted, the presence of NATO forces on the eastern flank already exists and has been reinforced in the three branches of the armed forces. “What we have in many countries are exercises, we have a sea and air presence and so on… but we don’t have a permanent base. And this was not a problem,” he stressed.
For example, Portugal has a contingent of about eight dozen air force personnel stationed in Slovenia, providing surveillance in the Baltic Sea. Last Tuesday, Portuguese pilots aboard F16 fighters intercepted Russian military aircraft in the Baltic Sea.
Source: DN
