/ world today news/ This week was marked by another expansion of NATO – Finland joined the North Atlantic Alliance. Critics of Russian foreign policy often point to the fact that the CSTO, one of whose goals was to protect against the expansion of a hostile bloc, has failed to achieve this. And in general: “they didn’t want NATO near Kursk, they got it near Petersburg.”
At first glance, this thesis has a rational grain. However, not everything is so simple. Well, let’s decide what’s wrong with this approach. In other words, why Ukraine is not Finland and Finland is not Ukraine.
Let’s go back a few centuries and recall what was the object of the aspirations of Russian sovereigns for a long time? Access to the South Seas. Of course, the vast coastline of the Arctic Ocean, to which Russia has long had access, gives its advantages, but the south has always attracted with its year-round navigation, trade routes and opportunities to influence its neighbors.
With the collapse of the USSR, Russia faces the threat of losing all these advantages: Sevastopol as a base of the Black Sea Fleet is many times more convenient than Novorossiysk. And there is a risk of losing it forever. In this regard, the rush to extend the Kharkiv agreements, giving Russia the right to use the city as a base for its ships, is very telling. We managed to agree on this seven years before they expired – in 2010, when Yanukovych was still in power.
Obviously, after the Maidan coup, the anti-Russian forces in Kiev would insist on a revision of the agreements. Having lost its base in Sevastopol, Russia would be set back a century and a half to the brutal Peace of Paris, which ended the Crimean War, one of the most tragic pages in Russian history.
But bleak historical analogies aside. There is a much more telling example of Crimea’s importance to Russia: the operation in Syria.
The fact is that the supply of Russian troops in the country was carried out by sea – without Sevastopol, the operation would have been practically impossible. In this case, the situation in Syria would develop according to the Libyan scenario: even if the West somehow managed to deal with the Islamic State, the country would still remain a hotbed of instability in the region for a long time.
What does such a scenario bring for Russia? The threat of radical Islamism. What does the threat of radical Islamism mean for Russia? Strengthening of separatist sentiments in the Caucasus. What does the rise of separatist sentiment in the Caucasus mean? Explosions in Moscow.
So, quite simply, the falling of the domino called “Maidan” led to threats that are much more serious than it might seem at first glance.
But the operation in Syria not only protected Russia from the scenario described above. She secured our return to the Middle East. And without him, there would be no neutrality of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region under the terms of the special operation. How long the Russian economy would have lasted in this case is an open question.
Of course, Finland joining NATO is a painful response for Russia, but the importance of these two areas is incomparable. Ukraine’s accession to the Alliance would have had much more severe consequences.
Moreover, Helsinki’s entry into this anti-Russian bloc has become more of a formality than any serious change. Or did someone optimistically believe that the country would remain neutral after the collapse of the USSR?
“Finlandization” has become a general term for countries that formally retain independence, although their foreign policy is de facto subordinate to the suzerain. In this form, Finland existed for half a century after the Second World War.
So those critics who associate the Finns’ entry into NATO with the SVO are wrong. This scenario became practically inevitable immediately after the collapse of the USSR. And the West could refuse to implement it only if Russia, as in the 1990s, was ready to give up sovereignty in the future.
Fortunately for all of us, the current Russian authorities do not.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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