Miscellaneous wrote:
> Well, it'll be no surprise Finland has announced the desire to join NATO.
> That should rattle Putin. ..
Putin is, of course, from St Petersburg, as is much of his inner circle, many fellow alumni of the KGB Academy there (then, of course, called Leningrad).
<history nerd
>
Since the time of the Tsars, the Grand Duchy of Finland, even when nominally acknowledging the Tsars' sovereignty, was regarded with wary suspicion in St P, which is very close to the traditional historic Finnish border. The end of WW2 settlement by which Soviet forces left most Finnish territory which they had occupied as the nominally independent Finns lost their Wehrmacht backing in '44, included the USSR (and the RSFSR within it) grabbing a chunk of historically Finnish border territory from which ethnic Finns were expelled, notably the City of Vyborg on the St Petersburg-Helsinki railway and highway; this pushed the international border significantly further away from St P, and is a continuing source of Russian self-reassurance and Finnish resentment. There are many prominent Vyborgers in Finnish public and political life, including the former President (and Nobel Laureate) Martti Ahtisaari
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyborg</>
Putin may well claim that Finland joining NATO is part of a 'revanchist' Finnish Nationalist ('Nazi') plot to regain territory. There may be some hotheaded Finnish nationalists (possibly 'useful idiots' provoked by Russian trolling) who will give him ammunition, and an excuse to take 'pre-emptive, defensive' action befor any formal NATO accession. Estonia (whose language is cognate to Finnish, with mutual intelligibility; probably closer than are Russian and Ukrainian to each other) has frequently been a target for major and clearly coordinated cyber-attacks; it would be unsurprising if Finland now was.
(mere guide at) Jet Age Museum, Gloucestershire Airport
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