On 20 June 2018, seven Finnish and seven Swedish former ambassadors, journalists and military officers published a debate article advocating NATO membership for their two countries. The article was published in Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden and in several newspapers belonging to Lännen Mediat in Finland.
The article is printed below in an English translation.
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On 8 May 2018, the Finnish and Swedish Ministers of Defense, Jussi Niinistö and Peter Hultqvist, met with U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis at the Pentagon.
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Finland’s largest Swedish speaking newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, recently interviewed Erkki Bahovski, the Editor-in-Chief of Diplomaatia.
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The Finnish voters have spoken. In the presidential elections held on Sunday 28 January 2018, they gave the current President of the Republic, Mr. Sauli Niinistö, a landslide re-election victory of 62,7 per cent of the popular vote, and a resounding mandate to him for the next six years.
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Each year, toward the end of November, excitement begins to build up among the Finnish foreign and defense policy cognoscenti, as the results of an annual public opinion survey sponsored by the Advisory Board of Defence Information (Maanpuolustustiedotuksen suunnittelukunta, MTS), is to be launched.
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ICDS research fellow Ivo Juurvee participated as presenter and a panelist discussion on societal security and resilience in Helsinki on 24 August.
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As a rule, following what happens in Finnish domestic politics amounts to watching paint dry.
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What does a small militarily non-aligned country do for its defence if it is located in a region where the operational environment has radically changed, military activity and military tensions have quickly increased, the early-warning for military action has become drastically shorter, and the threshold for the use of military force, or a threat thereof, has dramatically lowered.
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During the last few years, there has been a noticeable surge in bilateral and multilateral defence cooperation ventures among the Nordic states. The most well-known of these is NORDEFCO (Nordic Defence Cooperation). However, NORDEFCO is, essentially a framework for cooperation – it is not even a standalone organization , let alone a body resembling a political or military alliance.
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Estonian, Finnish and Irish troops serve under a combined battalion in the UNIFIL mission in south Lebanon. The size of the contribution these three states make to UN peacekeeping is perhaps not well known – they are respectively the fourth, second and first largest European contributors, per capita, to UN missions. For each of them, UNIFIL is their single largest contribution to peace support operations.
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