Sweden, Finland to be welcomed to NATO with open arms: Stoltenberg

Finland and Sweden will be welcomed to NATO with open arms and their accession process will expectedly take place quickly if they decide to join the Western military alliance, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says.

“Finland and Sweden are our closest partners. They are strong and mature democracies, EU members, and we have worked with them for many, many years. We know that their armed forces meet NATO standards,” Stoltenberg told reporters on Wednesday in Brussels.

He said he was sure arrangements could be found for the interim period between an application by the two Scandinavian countries and the formal ratification in the parliaments of all 30 NATO members, adding that he planned to speak with the Finnish president later in the day.

On April 14, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is currently the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council said, that if Finland — which shares a 1,300-kilometer border with Russia — and Sweden joined the US-led military alliance, it would more than double Russia’s land border with NATO member states.

Medvedev stressed that Russia would “seriously reinforce its group of ground forces and air defenses and deploy significant naval forces in the Gulf of Finland” if that happened.

The former Russian president also said that he hoped Finland and Sweden would see sense. If not, he said, they would have to live with nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles close to their territories.

SS