Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said on Monday that his country will respond in accordance with its national interests if Finland closes the entirety of their joint border like the Finnish Interior Minister threatened to do last week.
This from survivethenews.com.
Finnish border guards patrol the frontier with Russia
In the intervening days—although the EU said that it is ready to send forces to that frontier—Finland gassed a group of border crossers, and also deployed soldiers there too.
Taken together, Finland is clearly hellbent on positioning itself as a frontline NATO state against Russia.
Finland’s prime minister has accused Russia of helping crossers get into the country illegally, saying some have been helped by Russian border guards.
Finnish officials say migrants [illegals] arrive by car before cycling across the border in small groups to claim asylum.
Finland shares a 1,340km (833-mile) border with Russia, Europe’s longest.
The number of crossings remains small but has been rising recently. Border guards say they have registered approximately 89 crossings in two days. That compares with 91 in the four months to 12 November.
Finland officials said:
Traditionally, Russian guards haven’t allowed people to arrive at the Finnish border without proper documents. But Russian authorities had definitely changed their policy in recent months.
Many of the illegals are crossing into Finland by bicycle, exploiting an agreement allowing cycling across the border. Last week Finland banned crossings by bike.
The latest dynamics suggest that NATO is conspiring to place more pressure on Russia along the bloc’s new Finnish member’s frontier, which is intended to provoke reciprocal military moves that can then be decontextualized as so-called ‘unprovoked aggression’ for justifying a self-sustaining cycle of escalation.
It’s unclear how far and fast everything can move, but this seems to be the intent, which importantly comes amidst the bloc rethinking its proxy war on Russia through Ukraine.
This summer’s counteroffensive failed, Russia won the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with NATO, and that bloc’s former Supreme Commander recently argued for a Korean-like armistice, all of which is happening against the backdrop of the West reportedly pressuring Kiev to recommence peace talks.
In the event that this proxy war freezes, then there’s a certain logic inherent in replacing some of this lost pressure upon Russia via the opening of other fronts like the Finnish one.
Granted, the ‘mutually assured destruction’ (MAD) between NATO and Russia places very real limits on how much pressure can be exerted along this newfound front, but still opening it might be deemed by the bloc’s decisionmakers to be better than keeping it closed in that scenario.
In other words, “where one door closes, another opens”, or to be more direct, the end of NATO’s proxy war on Russia via Ukraine could lead to the opening of a less high-stakes but still destabilizing front in Finland.
This outcome would also serve the supplementary purpose of being exploited by the mass propaganda media as the “publicly plausible” pretext for accelerating the Arctic’s militarization.
This ‘final frontier’ of the New Cold War is poised to soon be a theater of competition between the US-led West’s Golden Billion and the Sino-Russo Entente due to the Northern Sea Route’s growing role in facilitating East-West trade. Considering this, hyping up the Finnish front like NATO is already doing ‘kills two birds with one stone.’
