Finland builds fence for defense amid Russian threats

May 15, 2023 12:41 PM

Will Russia carry through on its threats against Finland for joining NATO? Teri Schultz reports how Helsinki is bolstering the border in case Moscow's war plans veer west. In Imatra, the city nearest to where the fence project is kicking off, Mayor Matias Hilden says no one is enthusiastic about the project, but they're resigned to it. "It's a little bit sad that we need it," he told DW in an interview in Imatra City Hall.
posted by folklore724 (25 comments total)

No, they won’t. They can’t afford to. They don’t have the resources, and the resources they do have are in no state of good repair at all. They’ll rattle their rusty sabres but the Russia people were afraid of is gone.

I liked that the first picture of a fence was two strands of barbed wire though. A sensibly proportional response.
posted by mhoye at 12:53 PM on May 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

I have a serious proposal for Finland: Hire Donald J. Trump to build your wall.

This will make Americans happy (because he'll be distracted in 2024), and the Finns will be happy too (because he'll get Russia to pay for it).
posted by chavenet at 1:27 PM on May 15, 2023 [12 favorites]

Flowers tend to bloom more fiercely when the plant is beginning to starve for nutrients.

I wouldn't assume that a country having difficulty is solely controlled by individuals who will behave prudently.
posted by amtho at 1:28 PM on May 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

Is the suggestion that there are rogue elements inside Russia that might launch a non-government attack on Finland because Russia is in dire straits at the moment? Or that Putin is irrational enough to attempt a second war while the first is going so badly?

I mean, I understand the need for this, even as a symbol. But I don't think any serious thinkers believe that Russia is a threat to Finland right now.

Anyway, Finland is in NATO now. So attacking Finland is attacking 30 countries, not just one.
posted by hippybear at 1:44 PM on May 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

Finland did nearly 50 years of thinking, planning and preparing civil and defence policy in order to navigate this risk, and then didn't (couldn't) fall into the trap of the "peace dividend" in 1991. It's exactly the kind of too-prickly, too-coherent, too-motivated military proposition that policy wonks in the US wish Taiwan in foresight and Ukraine in hindsight would / had become, since long before the sudden shift towards NATO membership.

I guess, though, that even if "that" Russia is indeed gone the one that's still there is just as, likely even more, able to make Finns (and Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, let alone people outside the umbrella in Moldova, Georgia etc. etc.) afraid in a very real and serious manner.

Even without taking nukes into account the vague best-case endgame a lot of people across the sea might come up with, Russians seeing sense and somehow overthrowing their rusty regime, looks extremely different and much, much grimmer for those who share some of those ≈ 20,000km of land borders.
posted by protorp at 1:45 PM on May 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

They don’t have the resources, and the resources they do have are in no state of good repair at all.

No, but Russia’s friends (China, Iran, India, N.Korea) have lots of resources to lend/sell Russia.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:47 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

It’s been interesting to follow how Finns have processed Russia’s belligerence. The first thing that happened is that Finnish reticence to join NATO turned on a dime. Almost overnight polls showed that the public went from being opposed to in favor, and by a lot.

There was some trepidation around the accession day, but it was more about cyberattacks than anything concrete, and nothing major went down.

Since then people in general have barely given Russia’s opinions about all this any thought. It just feels like the new status quo to people.

The people whose jobs it is to worry about these things are taking precautions, and the fence building is one of them. As far as I’ve been able to tell, the main purpose of it isn’t to stop a tank, so much as to be something that’ll need cutting if anyone wants to go through, which will be a visible trace.

Of course, there have been Finns whose job it is to worry about Russia for a very long time, and I’m sure they’ve got all kinds of projects going, and the fence is just one of them.
posted by Kattullus at 2:33 PM on May 15, 2023 [17 favorites]

Iran and NK might help out, I don’t think that China or India would want to risk it. I could be wrong, but if Russia attacks NATO and China gets involved… that seems like a recipe for WWIII.
posted by jzb at 2:35 PM on May 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Putin will need to get Trump reelected first, because Trump already thinks Finland is part of Russia.
posted by Brian B. at 2:36 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

the fence building is one of them. As far as I’ve been able to tell, the main purpose of it isn’t to stop a tank

As with many such borders, it is more about saying "this is the line" than "we stop you here".

Having visited the Inter-German border during the cold war, I know what a "we stop you here" border looks like.
posted by hippybear at 3:02 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Not that I wish for conflict, but I kind of hope Russia is dumb enough to try fighting a two-front war, especially against a former enemy that handed them their asses. If there's any justice, Finland might even get some of its formerly-annexed land back from the terrorist state.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:21 PM on May 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, it’s really more of a “serious consequences occur beyond this point” type of fence.
posted by aramaic at 4:22 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

No, they won’t. They can’t afford to. They don’t have the resources, and the resources they do have are in no state of good repair at all. They’ll rattle their rusty sabres but the Russia people were afraid of is gone.

People said similar things in the past and now a hundred thousand are dead. One hopes that the word "NATO" is sufficient deterrent, but are you quite certain Putin won't snatch ruin from the jaws of defeat? I put extremely low odds of it but "that would be extremely stupid and counterproductive" argument doesn't seem to win the day at the Kremlin.
posted by pwnguin at 4:53 PM on May 15, 2023 [12 favorites]

They’ll rattle their rusty sabres but the Russia people were afraid of is gone.

People said similar things in the past and now a hundred thousand are dead.

The most sanguine of Ukraine supporters expected a rapid occupation of Kyiv and a dismembered Ukrainian state with, perhaps, a new capital in Lviv, if it survived at all. The invading army couldn't even double the previously occupied territory carved out previously with only materiel and advisory assistance (no troops for Luhansk and Donetsk's "People's Republics") and a waltz in Crimea. Literally the only strategic success during the current phase of the war (Feb 2022 forward) was being able to take and keep a land bridge to Crimea.

All they have left are cannon fodder and nukes. If Russia is reduced to human waves and ICBMs, the massive conventional military feared capable of rolling right through every former Soviet state with combined-arms Battalion Tactical Groups well and truly is gone.
posted by tclark at 5:50 PM on May 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

I don't think it's safe to count Russia—even just the Putin Regime—out just yet, based solely on what has happened in Ukraine.

The initial invasion of Ukraine went terribly for Russia, and the Ukrainians fought harder and more brilliantly than anyone seemed to expect (although I think much of the pessimism within the US defense establishment was due to just having watched the Afghanistan military collapse like a wet paper bag).

The Russians are unlikely to make a mistake like that again, though. And while their blitzkrieg assault on Kyiv failed, their piecemeal takeover of eastern Ukraine is harder to fault, strategically. That's the sort of thing I'd be concerned about if I lived in a country with a Russian land border: not a whole Motor Rifle division rolling in overnight, but "Little Green Men" conducting grey-zone shit, degrading civilian infrastructure, creating false alarms and stimulating defensive responses over and over, that sort of thing. And after a while, maybe grabbing some land here and there when they think they can get away with it.

To some extent, the risk to Finland and the Baltic states might actually increase as the situation in Ukraine gets worse for Russia: Putin doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's just going to admit that he screwed up, and a traditional way of papering over a military loss is to get a win somewhere else, and extract yourself from the no-win situation when everyone's focused on the good news. I could absolutely see Putin touching off a little border war in order to distract the Russian population from Ukraine.

At the very least, marking the border and making it harder for the Russian Border Patrol to "accidentally" set up their own fence on the Finnish side of it, seems like a good first step.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:16 PM on May 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

Small "accidents" happen all the time, part and parcel of being neighbours with Russia. Here in Norway two Russian sailors were brought in by the police after going ashore in "winter clothes" closely resembling Russian military uniforms. Shenanigans happen at sea and in the air all the time. Being very clear on what is acceptable is a good move.
posted by Harald74 at 10:35 PM on May 15, 2023 [9 favorites]

And security and readiness work needs to be ahead of the curve, not lagging. I'm thinking about German rearmament in the 30s. Germany was soundly defeated in WWI, and crippled economically. But from the time the Nazi party came to power in 1933 until they kicked off WWII in 1939 was only six years. As an authoritarian state, building up to be a threat to smaller neighbours can be very quick if you decide to go all short-sighted with a war economy. Military procurement in a democracy usually can't even decide on a new kind of glove in that time span.
posted by Harald74 at 10:43 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

As people have said, it isn’t that Putin is ‘too sensible’ to invade Finland: for now, incredible as it is, he literally has not got the capacity. Any capacity. Who’s going to go? Wagner? Of course the Finns are absolutely right to take nothing for granted, but it really looks as if, should Putin order an invasion, nothing would happen. I say ‘nothing’: perhaps a mutiny and headlong flight from Ukraine.
posted by Phanx at 12:34 AM on May 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

About that fence we're building:
It is really just a rather short segment to counter one particular threat Russia has previously used - flooding the border with illegal immigrants. Exactly what happened in Baltics and Poland prior to the attack on Ukraine, and had it been successful, the immigration system would've been overwhelmed to deal with refugees from Ukraine. Most of the people who weren't able to cross to the EU then flew back to their home countries in middle-east and north-Africa. Immoral to immigrants as a weapon in hybrid warfare and one of the known tricks that Russia does, thus the need for tens of km of fence near the points where it is easy to bring people by train or bus as they did earlier. The aim is to guide the people to proper points of crossing where everything can be done by the book and to prevent thousands from crossing over simultaneously through the woods. That new short fence is exactly against that particular form of hybrid warfare and has no real benefit for anything else.

Otherwise, the Finland-Russia border is just mostly a 20m cut-down strip of forest with some poles and occasional symbolic pieces of waist-tall fence. The real border guarding is about remote sensors and patrols and they are very effective. Especially on the Russian side, they guard it up to 10-30 km to prevent illegal crossings, traditionally from their side to the west.

Other than that, right now it is rather calm. Russia knows very well that this front is calm and no threat to them and they've emptied almost all of the troops previously stationed near Finland to Ukraine. Some formal gesturing happens such as movements of troops in and out and repositioning of them, but overall the threat level/forces gathered on that border is less than in decades.

But, the war on Ukraine has taught many important lessons: Finland is acquiring new missile defence systems, drones and highlighted the need to have larger material supplies/ways to manufacture them faster than what has now been observed. (Also Navy is getting new ships within a decade, then those F-35s, and the overall aim of all of the Nordic+baltic airforces training is to act as a combined force.) But - we're witnessing significant evolution of Russian warfare doctrine. As well as we were and are prepared to counter a similar attack that what happened in the first weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, they would not act the same any longer, and thus the need to adapt to the latest. Have to give it to the Russians, they're running agile quite decently and have so far gone through four of five standards of attacking. While threats such as "all of the baltic-sea cables" having been mined by Russia are talked, I trust our military is most competent on all of this.
posted by Arkki at 1:47 AM on May 16, 2023 [31 favorites]

Wagner?

Prigozhin is already stretched fighting against Ukraine and the Russian military.
posted by Artw at 5:54 AM on May 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I thought that the Russians went after Ukraine because that was where they felt the most insult--the Ukrainians were meant to be the little brothers and helpers of Russia, until they were turned by pernicious Germanic sorts who were trying to make them into EU perverts. I suppose Finland would be helpful to Russia in some sort of geographic sense but there's nobody there for revanchists to get misty eyed over.
posted by kingdead at 6:50 AM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Something like that. Tankies will make a different reason about Russia feeling threatened, but Russia didn’t really go in under that narrative. I suspect the truth is something like “because there were things to steal, and they thought it would be easy”.
posted by Artw at 7:09 AM on May 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

I thought that the Russians went after Ukraine because that was where they felt the most insult

Ukraine has major newly discovered oil and gas fields sitting next to pipelines and storage already built. They are now direct competition with Russia, which is a just an oil company with a new disadvantage in location. And Ukraine has titanium, which is something a military planner would strategically keep from their adversary.

Prigozhin is already stretched fighting against Ukraine and the Russian military.

Discord leaks exposed him as willing to turn against Russians. He might be safer in Bakmut where there are no buildings left standing tall enough to toss him from a window.
posted by Brian B. at 7:21 AM on May 16, 2023 [11 favorites]

Red Dawn in Lapland (2017)
posted by gottabefunky at 8:51 AM on May 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Reading up on the Winter War and there’s some familiar notes…

The Soviets made several demands, including that Finland cede substantial border territories in exchange for land elsewhere, claiming security reasons – primarily the protection of Leningrad, 32 km (20 mi) from the Finnish border. When Finland refused, the Soviets invaded. Most sources conclude that the Soviet Union had intended to conquer all of Finland, and cite the establishment of the puppet Finnish Communist government and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocols as evidence of this

Technically Russia won that one, with Finland ceding territory, but really they got their asses kicked to such an extent doing it it’s treated like a loss.

This is currently the best possible outcome for Russia in Ukraine, now I thibk about it.
posted by Artw at 9:06 AM on May 16, 2023 [6 favorites]