TIRANA, April 4 – Finland on Tuesday became an official member of the NATO military alliance, becoming the 31st country to join the alliance, which vows in its treaty that an attack on one of its members is an attack on them all.
“Finland’s membership is not targeted against anyone. Nor does it change the foundations or objectives of Finland’s foreign and security policy,” Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said in a written statement Tuesday.
His comments came shortly after the country’s foreign affairs minister, Pekka Haavisto, handed over all the accession documents in Brussels, at NATO’s headquarters, in the presence of the group’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, and U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken.
“Welcome to the alliance,” Stoltenberg told Finnish representatives at the ceremony.
Authorities in Helsinki decided that in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the country was no longer safe on its own and applied to join the alliance a few months later. Finland shares an 832-mile border with Russia, the longest of any European Union member. NATO’s border with Russia will roughly double in size after Finland’s accession.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said according to Reuters that Russia would closely follow any NATO deployments in Finland and that his country would take “counter-measures” to this accession. /Argumentum.al
