Finland formally became the 31st member of Nato this week, ditching decades of non-alignment to join the military alliance in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The country has spent decades building and maintaining a fighting force to guard its 832 mile frontier with Russia and deter any invasion.
With hundreds of tanks, dozens of aircraft and the ability to call on large numbers of reservists, the Finnish military has long been one of the most powerful in Europe and is now one of the most capable in Nato.
The legacy of the Winter War still casts a shadow over Finland. The conflict, also known as the First Finnish-Soviet War, saw Finland’s armed forces inflict monumental casualties on a vast invading Red Army during the bitter winter months of 1939/40.
The war, which resulted in territorial losses for Finland, taught the Finns the need for an army capable of deterring Russia from ever invading again.
Attack Finland, the logic goes, and its armed forces will, just like they did in the Winter War, savage your army.
This is why Finland has built its armed forces on defence. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the country did not, as so many others did, pivot to establishing a small mobile army suited for expeditionary warfare. It preferred to maintain a large defensively orientated force.
“Finland’s defence policy has been very conservative in the sense that unlike other European states, it has never tried to trim its forces so they can undertake international crisis management operations,” said Tuomas Iso-Markku, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. “The main focus has always been on defending Finland. So in that sense, it’s definitely true that Finland is quite different from most European states.”
One difference is that it kept conscription. Under the Finnish constitution, every male citizen aged between 18 and 60 is liable for call-up, and each year some 22,000 men join the army. This means that Finland’s tiny standing army of around 19,000 can quickly grow to 280,000, while thousands more could also be mobilised in a time of national crisis.
Conscription also remains popular in Finland; built upon a broad societal understanding of the need to maintain national defence. A poll from December 2021, for example, revealed that 84 per cent of Finns were willing to defend their country to the best of their abilities.
In line with this defensive posture, Finland has invested heavily in big guns, giving it one of the strongest artillery forces in Europe. It now has some 1,500 weapons, including 700 howitzers and cannons and 100 heavy and light rocket launchers.
It also boasts a tank force of around 650 armoured vehicles, which includes 200 German-made Leopard 2 main battle tanks, putting it on a par with any army in Europe, including Britain.
Reacting to the Ukraine war, Finland has boosted its defence budget. This year the country is due to spend 1.9 per cent of its GDP on defence, while two years ago it spent 1.3 per cent. The increased spending has allowed it to purchase F-35 fighter aircraft from the US, to complement the country’s already bristling, and high-tech, air defences.
The Finnish Air Force will help defend Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
Encompassing a vulnerable and narrow peninsula of Nato territory bordered to the west, for the most part, by Russia or its subservient ally Belarus, the three Baltic states have long been a source of worry for Nato planners.
But Finnish membership will help ease these concerns. The Alliance’s reach now extends north and east of the Baltic states, changing the security landscape of eastern Europe.
Finnish membership also enhances Nato’s presence in the Baltic Sea, and, crucially, now means the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, which is just 43 miles across, is dominated by Alliance states, with Estonia to the south and Finland to the north.
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