Moscow (EFE).- Finland today becomes a 31st member of NATO and with it another country of the Alliance borders with Russia, a circumstance that has become a concern for Moscow, in the field of its security.
The Kremlin has already warned on Tuesday that it will not leave Finland’s entry into NATO unanswered.
“That forces us to take countermeasures to guarantee our security,” said the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitri Peskov, referring to Finland’s accession to the Atlantic Alliance and the fact that the border between it and Russia is now doubled.
Peskov has assured that Moscow will act based on how NATO “exploits the territory” of Finland and if it deploys its infrastructure near the Russian border.
According to the Kremlin spokesman, the expansion of the Alliance threatens the security and interests of Russia: that is how we perceive it. That is why Moscow will take the necessary measures to guarantee its security at the “tactical and strategic” level.
However, Peskov wanted to make it clear that the case of Finland differs from Ukraine’s aspirations to join the Euro-Atlantic bloc. “The situation with Finland is radically different from that of Ukraine,” he said.
In this sense, he recalled that “Finland has never been anti-Russia and there have been no disputes” with Helsinki.
Nuclear deployment in Belarus
For his part, the Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, has indicated that Finland’s entry into NATO creates risks of a significant expansion of the conflict in Ukraine.
“NATO is carrying out a set of measures to increase the combat readiness of the Joint Armed Forces, intensifying combat training and reconnaissance activities near the Russian and Belarusian borders,” Shoigu said.
In an intervention before the leadership of the Russian Armed Forces, the minister denounced that the Atlantic Alliance is reinforcing its “anti-Russian” course, which “leads to an escalation of the conflict”, by increasing US military aid to Ukraine with tanks and modern armored vehicles, as well as long-range weapons that “have a range of up to 150 kilometers.”
For all these reasons, Shoigu specified, Russia and Belarus are taking measures, so that part of the Belarusian combat planes can now hit enemy targets “with nuclear weapons”.
Specifically, the Defense Minister recalled that Russia sent the Iskander-M tactical and operational missile system, capable of using nuclear weapons, to the neighboring country.
Today, Belarusian soldiers have begun training in the handling of the system in Russia, in a course that will include the study of the maintenance and use of tactical nuclear weapons of the Iskander-M OTRK.