From Atlantic Counsel By Peter Dickinson: Sweden is poised to become the thirty-second member of the NATO Alliance and Russia does not appear to be at all concerned by the prospect. The breakthrough moment for the Swedes came ahead of last week’s NATO summit in Vilnius, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed to end months of opposition and back the Scandinavian nation’s bid to join the Alliance. Russia’s response to Sweden’s imminent NATO accession has been muted to say the least, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov limiting himself to promises of “appropriate measures” and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warning about unspecified “negative consequences.”
This apparent lack of concern mirrors the Kremlin position over Finland’s NATO membership, which was confirmed in April 2023. On that occasion, Russia also downplayed the significance of the news while making vague commitments to strengthen its own military posture in the region. Indeed, in the fourteen months since the two Nordic nations first announced their intention to join the Alliance, Moscow has done almost nothing to protest or obstruct this process, despite having a vast array of military, cyber, economic, informational, and diplomatic tools at its disposal. If Putin genuinely believed the NATO Alliance posed a security threat to the Russian Federation, he would at the very least have increased the Russian military presence close to the Finnish border. Instead, Russia reportedly reduced its troop deployments in the region by approximately 80%. These are obviously not the actions of a nation under siege.
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