Squinting against the rain, Swedish and Finnish soldiers looked on at a handful of Stockholm’s 155 mm Archer howitzers blasting live shells across Europe’s largest training area, Rovajärvi.
Sprawled just over the line, carving out the Arctic Circle in Finland’s northernmost region, Lapland, Rovajärvi has hosted Swedish and British troops learning how to fight together roughly 70 miles from Russia’s northwestern border.
A few miles from the Archers, British Army soldiers launched missiles from their M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), hitting targets just over 26 kilometers to the north in well under a minute, drones buzzing overhead to scope out the terrain. Slightly further afield in Sodankylä, the United Kingdom’s newly filled-out fleet of upgraded Apache helicopters test-fired more than a dozen short-range Hellfire missiles.
But soldiers representing three of NATO‘s members are putting Russia’s proximity to one side during their stints in Rovajärvi and Sodankylä, those watching and carrying out the drills say.
Standing in the sleet, Lieutenant Colonel Kimmo Ruotsalainen, the commander of an artillery regiment in Finland’s Kainuu Brigade leading the Lapland drills, said the soldiers gathered in the Arctic had been focusing on smoothing out how they work together, rather than homing in on the specifics of the threat across the border.
While “absolutely” designed with Russia in mind, Ruotsalainen said these exercises are about improving the sync between three of the alliance’s members.
“Everyone knows the importance, for example, of the Allied training together—defense forces training together—and reservists rehearsals,” he told Newsweek.
“They are not questioned at the moment,” Ruotsalainen said. But when asked how Russia’s presence is felt in Rovajärvi, he remarked, “It doesn’t matter that much mentality-wise when we train, which is the threat.”
“You cannot go on every day and think about it,” one Swedish soldier at the exercises said.
Finland, with its hundreds of years of fraught history with Russia, became a member of NATO little over a year after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Sweden joined a year later.
Helsinki’s addition to the alliance doubled the length of Russia’s land border with NATO. Moscow vowed to retaliate and has started intensive reforms of its forces in the northwest of the country, including expanding the military facilities a stone’s throw from Finland and Estonia, a fellow NATO member just to the south of Helsinki.
Military personnel on NATO’s northeastern edge say they expect the Russian troops drained from these bases close to alliance soil to return once Moscow and Kyiv ink a ceasefire deal in negotiations pushed forcefully by the United States.
Russia is a familiar threat on Finland’s shoulder, far predating the bitter conflict in Ukraine, the country’s soldiers say.
“The Finns are used to living next door to Russia, so everything is focused on how they’re going to defend Finland from Russia,” Brigadier Nick English, commander of the British Army’s 1st Aviation Brigade Combat Team deployed to Lapland, told Newsweek.
“That makes it real in a way that it isn’t if you’re training in the U.K.,” he said.
“We’re all aware of it,” said Alfie Giles, a 19-year-old British Army air trooper working with the Apache attack helicopters in Sodankylä. “We’re just here to exercise with our NATO allies.”
But the Russia of the last few decades will not be the same country or military force that emerges from the trenches of Ukraine. The Kremlin’s plans to swell the number of active troops to 1.5 million will make Russia the second-largest military in the world—a battle-hardened force on the cutting edge of drone development, supported by tried-and-tested next-generation hypersonic weapons that NATO currently doesn’t have.
Estonia’s foreign intelligence service warned last year that NATO could stare down a “Soviet-style mass army that, while technologically inferior to the allies, poses a significant threat due to its size, firepower and reserves” by the mid-2030s.
Denmark’s Defense Intelligence Service said in February it expected Russia to be able to wage a “large-scale war” against NATO in the next five years if the U.S. declines to be involved.
The Finnish exercises, dubbed Northern Strike 125, are part of a set of drills across the eastern edge of NATO territory, sweeping down from Scandinavia, through the Baltic States pressed up against Russia and Belarus and further south.
“From the skies over Poland, to the northern reaches of Finland the U.K. is standing shoulder to shoulder with our allies in leading the way in defending NATO’s eastern flank,” said British armed forces minister Luke Pollard.
“I would anticipate future activity both here and across the Baltic States,” British Army Major Joe Wooldridge told Newsweek.
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