Translated material
Carnegie Endowment expert Alexander Gabuev on why Finland and Sweden rushed to join NATO
Even medium-sized companies that are strongly tied to the Russian market are queuing to enter
Since the beginning of the war, he has already been to Stockholm twice, and now he has reached Helsinki. The fact that Sweden and Finland joined NATO shortly after the attack on Ukraine is not surprising - it was generally predicted in advance, along with many other negative consequences of the war for Russia itself. For the physical security of the Russian Federation, little will change - both countries were already closely integrated with the alliance, which was taken into account in Russian military planning (although the Russian leadership is now promising to deploy additional military infrastructure in the northwest, increasing military spending). It would be useful for Russia to ask the question: “Why did our two neighbors, who did not join NATO either during the Cold War or during the waves of expansion of the alliance that followed the collapse of the USSR, rush to join right now?” My interlocutors from among the Swedish and Finnish officials, businessmen and experts give a very accessible answer - and they surprise me with the similarity of their assessments of Russia, which until recently in Stockholm and Helsinki were very different.
The essence is extremely simple. February 24 and the events that followed dramatically changed the perception of how rational and pragmatic the Kremlin is when making decisions about war and peace: “If all the best foreign policy minds of Russia itself, with rare exceptions, were wrong about the war, it is not so important whether they lied deliberately, did not understand the logic decision-making in the Kremlin or simply wanted to believe in the best. For us, there is only one conclusion: the threshold of risks that Moscow considers acceptable, and the level of price that Russia is ready to pay to achieve irrational, in our opinion, goals, has shifted. So, now it’s better to be inside the legal circuit that provides protection for allies led by the United States, and not outside it - no matter how strong the army you have.” It will no longer be possible to object to this with the arguments that many domestic experts used before (“Who needs your countries at all, no one in the Kremlin is going to attack you, leave this Russophobic hysteria”). And of course, when Vladimir Putin recently spoke about the return of "primordially Russian lands" by Peter I during the Northern War, the desire to be in NATO as soon as possible among the Swedes and Finns only grew stronger.
Particularly interesting about business. Even medium-sized companies that are strongly tied to the Russian market are in line to enter, and for large Scandinavian corporations, the share of the Russian Federation in revenue in most cases is below 10% (and oh, how differently they say here about the idea of decoupling with China promoted by Washington and Brussels, accounting for 40-50% of sales!). In 2021, Russia's share in Finland's exports is only 5%, in imports - 9%. Some technology companies themselves asked the European Commission and OFAC not to make concessions and exceptions for their sectors, but to immediately include them in the sanctions - in order to write off losses in Russia and no longer suffer.
Such changes in the perception of Russia by the business and political elite of some of our neighbors are only a small and far from the most significant part of the negative consequences of the war for the interests of our country. Of course, if you think of them in pragmatic terms like the security and well-being of Russians.