“Sweden and Finns have until June to formalize an entry application, as their prime ministers have said.” Analyst Alessandro Politi, director of the NATO Defense Foundation, the only nongovernmental research center directly linked to NATO, explains that the accession of Sweden and Finland to the Atlantic Pact is not so imminent and only in the summer we will understand what will be the best formula for their possible membership.
Why did Ukraine want to join NATO yesterday, Sweden and Finland today?
“Ukraine was invited in 2008, but then, for obvious reasons, it was assumed that the invitation would not be pursued because of problems with Russia. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland were two countries that were consistently neutral during the Cold War, thinking neutrality was not enough. All of these neutral countries, including Serbia and Switzerland, are NATO partners and as such are outside the scope of the article. 5″.
Are Russia’s threats against them real?
“The Russians clearly said to the Swedes and Finns: ‘Make the decisions you want, but remember that if you become a member of NATO, we will protect our defenses on the borders we have with you and in of the Baltic Sea.’ involves a possible use of nuclear weapons not previously considered, this is more political than operational as the Russians already have nuclear weapons to hit Sweden and Finland, so I think the conflict is unlikely to linger expanding these countries, also because the Russian military machine comes out badly from the Ukrainian adventure”.
Why is Russia afraid of Sweden and Finland, two typically peaceful countries?
“The Russians don’t have problems with these two Scandinavian countries per se, but with NATO. I recall that the Atlantic Alliance, which Sweden and Finland would join, is superior to Russia in terms of spending and military strength, except for nuclear weapons, which is more like the Cold War era than the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries a conventional one had strength superior to NATO. That balance of power has been upset today”.
And then I phrase it differently: Why is Russia so afraid of NATO if the countries of the Atlantic Pact have never directly attacked Russian soil?
“True, but Putin is a man who grew up in the KGB and wants a range of neutral countries from the North to the Caucasus. But there was a time when NATO and Russia were real partners, but then the relationship collapsed.”
Are you referring to the Treaty of Pratica di Mare?
“Yes. It would have taken a lot of political will to sustain a partnership between NATO, in which the United States is the majority shareholder, and Russia, which still has a respectable nuclear power. When Putin saw a number of former Soviet countries joining NATO, he began to doubt what the future would hold. As early as 2007, Putin had warned that he would not accept any more eastward expansion of NATO. This signal was not fully understood, so much so in 2008 there was the war in Georgia and the socalled “open door” to Tbilisi and Kyiv”.
If the end of the USSR meant the end of the Cold War, why did NATO need to expand its borders eastward?
“It’s a good question that I asked myself precisely in those years and the answer was given to me by a Romanian colonel. He said to me, ‘You don’t know what it means when someone is definitely not on a certain . We don’t want to be in a gray area.” With hindsight, I understand that answer given the events in Ukraine. There is a difference between the de facto loss of a tenth of the country in a hybrid, as happened with Crimea and Donbass, and a real invasion. This has caused the Swedes and Finns to ask themselves certain questions. The legacy of communism in this case, I assure you, has nothing to do with it, it has to do with nationalism.”
But does that not mean that Putin wants to restore the USSR?
“No, ideology is just a superstructure. The Soviet Union could have been democratic, but the truth is that it was a competing power. Putin does not want to restore the USSR, he has the mentality of a Russian nationalist and is only interested in rebuilding a strong and powerful Russia. The war was a big mistake for him and he has already lost it because he failed to overthrow the Ukrainian government.”
So will there be no return of the Cold War?
“I am not afraid of the return of the Cold War, but I fear that if this situation does not end and the United States and China do not seriously negotiate, we risk a new world war for the Pacific. Ukraine is just a detail., while the Pacific is vital for both the United States and China. In Europe there is a detonator, but in the Pacific there are so many of the most important explosive charges that the Americans fired the nuclear detonator there in World War II and nonnuclear bombs in Europe”.