Brussels: Finland becomes the 31st member of NATO on Tuesday, in a historic strategic shift provoked by Moscow’s war on Ukraine, which doubles the US-led alliance’s border with Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last year, the Kremlin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine upended Europe’s security landscape and prompted Finland — and its neighbour Sweden — to drop decades of military non-alignment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Awkward allies Turkey and Hungary, for different reasons of their own, delayed Finland’s bid to come under the NATO umbrella — and Stockholm’s progress remains blocked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But last week, the Turkish parliament voted to clear Finland’s final hurdle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Completing the ratification in well under a year still makes this the fastest membership process in the alliance’s recent history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All that remained were Tuesday’s highly choreographed formalities at NATO headquarters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finland’s foreign minister will hand over the formal accession papers to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the keeper of NATO’s founding treaty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then the country’s blue-and-white flag will be raised next to those of its new allies, between Estonia and France, in front of the gleaming headquarters in Brussels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Not so many years ago we thought it was unthinkable that Finland would become a member. Now they will be a fully-fledged member of our alliance and that is truly historic,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We are removing the room for miscalculation in Moscow about NATO’s readiness to protect Finland, and that makes Finland safer.”<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brussels: Finland becomes the 31st member of NATO on Tuesday, in a historic strategic shift provoked by Moscow’s war on Ukraine, which doubles the US-led alliance’s border with Russia. Last year, the Kremlin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine upended Europe’s security landscape and prompted Finland — and its neighbour Sweden — to drop decades of military […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":4850,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[396,342,2621,73],"tags":[2588,77,199],"class_list":["post-4849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-politics","category-russia","category-security","tag-finland","tag-nato","tag-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4849"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}