Security Council Vice President and former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev today threatened the deployment of nuclear weapons in the Baltics if Sweden and Finland join NATO.
"It will be necessary to strengthen the grouping of ground forces, anti-aircraft defense, deploy significant naval forces in the waters of the Gulf of Finland. And then we will no longer be able to talk about a Baltic without nuclear weapons. Balance must be restored," Medvedev wrote on the social network Telegram.
Finland and Sweden are considering joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) following the ongoing war in Ukraine unleashed by Russia on February 24.
The Moscow authorities used as one of the justifications for invading Ukraine the goal of halting the advance of NATO to the East, since Kiev wanted to join the Western military alliance.
Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said Wednesday at the end of a meeting with her Swedish counterpart Magdalena Andersson in Stockholm that a decision on possible membership will be made before the NATO summit in Madrid scheduled for the end of June.
In his Telegram commentary, quoted by Russia's TASS news agency, Medvedev said that "very soon, by the summer of this year, the world will become safer" because Russia will have to strengthen its land borders with NATO countries.
According to the also former Russian prime minister, Russian borders with NATO will "more than double" if Finland and Sweden join the organization.
Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer-long border with Russia, which has five NATO members as neighbors: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Poland. According to NATO, the alliance members currently total 1,215 kilometers of the more than 20,000-kilometer land border that Russia has with 14 countries.
Russia also has land borders with Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, China, North Korea, Georgia, Mongolia, and Ukraine, and sea borders with Sweden, Japan, Turkey, and the United States.
Medvedev also said that NATO is willing to accept the two new members "in the shortest possible time and with minimum bureaucratic procedures." "This means that Russia will have more officially registered adversaries," he noted.
For Russia, according to Medvedev, it doesn't matter whether NATO has 30 members or 32 - "minus two, plus two, given its importance and population, there is no big difference," but Moscow must react, "without emotions, with a cool head."
Medvedev refuted the thesis that the question of the two countries' membership in NATO would not arise if Russia had not invaded Ukraine. "This is not so. First of all, attempts have been made before to drag them into the Alliance. Secondly, and more importantly, we have no territorial disputes with these countries, as is the case with Ukraine. And therefore, the price of such membership is different for us," he said.
Medvedev said that NATO membership divides public opinion in Finland and Sweden, despite the "utmost efforts of national propagandists," and called on Finns and Swedes to be aware of what is at stake.
"No one in their right mind wants price and tax increases, increased tension along the borders, [missiles] Iskander, hypersonics and nuclear-armed ships literally within arm's length of their own home," he wrote. "Let us hope that the intelligence of our neighbors to the North still wins out," he added.
Source: NM