“Anywhere you are, you can see Russia when you’re flying,” Brigadier Nick English, commander of the British Army’s 1st Aviation Brigade Combat Team, said as he strode through the snow and churned ground of Europe’s largest training ground in northern Finland.
“You’re that close,” he told Newsweek.
But NATO is ready for whatever Russia may do on the alliance’s northern flank, military personnel camped out in Finland’s Arctic Circle say, despite concerns about how ready Europe’s armed forces are for a fight with Russia and how long certain armies could hold out.
Finnish, Swedish and British soldiers have been plugging away through joint exercises crafted to induct NATO’s newest members into the alliance, live-firing howitzers and loading Hellfire missiles into Apache helicopters roughly 70 miles from the Russian border.
More drills have been rolled out further south along NATO’s eastern border, close to Russian soil, Belarusian territory and on Ukraine’s doorstep.
Finland, Sweden and the U.K. have pledged to raise military spending in the next few years, part of a drive across NATO to dedicate significantly more money to the military in the face of fierce criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump and burgeoning worries over what Russia could do next.
Military officials across NATO countries are increasingly outspoken about the threat Russia could pose to the alliance once Moscow has had a chance to recover from more than three years of grueling war in Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of its neighbor on February 24, 2022, has hacked away at the Kremlin’s ground forces but left much of the rest of the Russian military unscathed.
There are deepening concerns over where hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened Russian recruits, volunteers and conscripts will end up if a ceasefire deal is inked. Trump and senior officials in his administration have made putting an end to Europe’s largest land war since World War II a foreign policy priority, albeit one increasingly frustrating to the Republican president.
The Finns are certainly aware that Russia is expanding its bases close to its eastern border. The construction appears to be part of a longer-looking effort to expand Russian military facilities in spitting distance of NATO, The New York Times reported this week.
Russia had about 20,000 soldiers and four standby brigades close to Finland before 2022, according to Lieutenant General Vesa Virtanen, deputy chief of the Finnish armed forces. A brigade is typically between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers.
“Now we see that Russia is building new infrastructure and bringing more troops to this region as soon as they can,” Virtanen told German newspaper Die Welt last month. “They are reorganizing themselves.”
In late 2022, then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the Kremlin would remodel Russia’s military structure while inflating the number of service members over the next few years. Parts of the plan were to split Russia’s Western Military District—close to NATO’s eastern flank—into two districts, Moscow and Leningrad, and to grow the size of the military. This came into force in June 2024.
When Finland joined NATO in 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that reestablishing the Leningrad Military District was a direct result of NATO increasing its presence on Russia’s border. Finland’s accession to the alliance doubled the size of NATO’s border with Russia.
The number of Russian troops based close to Finland could double or triple compared to before the war with Ukraine, Pekka Turunen, head of Helsinki’s military intelligence, told Reuters in January.
Intelligence assessments, including from Estonia just south of Finland, have warned that NATO could face a large and experienced, if less technologically advanced, Russian military in the next few years. A wavering U.S. commitment makes this possibility more likely, many suggest.
Washington’s ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, said in recent days that talks on reducing the vast U.S. presence in Europe would come in the wake of the alliance’s upcoming summit in The Hague. The U.S. was not involved in this round of exercises in Finland, nor did it facilitate the drills.
While there is a public confidence in the strength of the alliance, there are concerns about gaping capability gaps across Europe. Air defense systems and supplies, as well as ammunition, are among the most urgent.
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