What constitutes an act of war? Finnish research fellow Minna Ålander considers the edge cases—damaged data cables, suspicious AirBnBs, and prank phone calls—under a new label: 'hybrid warfare.' In this episode we discuss Finland's responses to an ever-evolving security environment and the motivations behind Finland and Sweden's recent decisions to join NATO.
TRANSCRIPT
Minna Ålander: So there are for example— there was this problem in the spring of 2022 when Finland was applying for NATO membership that a lot of people looked at the map and were like, “Holy ****! Like, they have 800 miles of border with Russia. Like, this is gonna double the NATO Russia border with a single country if we take them into NATO,” and “What kind of a burden is it going to be to NATO? Is it in any way realistic to defend Finland?” —Because they didn't know that Finland has kept up its own defense capability that includes one of the largest armies, actually, in Europe, which is sort of surprising given that Finland has a population of 5.5 million. But Finland can mobilize in a case of war 280,000 troops, and then the total reserve is up to 900,000. So, almost no other European country—except maybe Turkey—has such numbers at this point, and this is thanks to having kept up the conscription system so that Finland is able actually to defend its own territory. And apparently this still is to an extent an issue, like also now as a NATO member, that so many NATO allies are still not fully aware of what Finland’s military capability is. So, like, that's why I gave so many interviews and was talking about this all the time. And I wrote I think, like, 6 or 10 very similar articles about Finland’s military capability in 2022 because basically nobody knew about it and everybody wanted to have the piece, sort of like, “What is Finland? What can Finland do?” And what's really interesting was that Finland, in its foreign policy, managed to make people forget that we are a neighbor of Russia. So many people were actually surprised when they looked at the map and they were like, “Oh, Finland is next to Russia!” —Because we always wanted people not to think about us as a neighbor of Russia primarily.
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Colin Gioia Connors: Welcome to Crossing North: a podcast where we learn from Nordic and Baltic artists, scholars, and community members to better understand our world, our communities, and ourselves. Coming to you from the Scandinavian Studies Department and Baltic Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle, I’m your host Colin Gioia Connors.
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Minna Ålander is a researcher with many titles. She is an associate fellow in the Chatham House Europe Program, a non-resident fellow in the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum. Previously, she worked at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Her research focuses on Northern European and Arctic security, Nordic defence cooperation, NATO, as well as wider European security. Minna keeps an academic eye trained on Finland's foreign and defense policies, especially as they relate to Northern Europe and NATO. So when both Finland and Sweden applied for NATO membership in 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, her focus made her a much-sought after public expert. Not only could Minna answer questions about Finland’s specific military capabilities, she could also answer questions about the ever-changing security environment in the entire Nordic-Baltic region.
Minna works to document and develop language to describe events that, on the one hand, might be dismissed as ‘accidents,’ or on the other hand, recognized as ‘deliberate acts of sabotage.’ The wide scale of coordination, intensity, and impact of these events poses a challenge for states — and state officials — when addressing them in terms of national and international security. Minna’s work to collect and analyze these events under the new label of “hybrid warfare” contributes to a common language and shared understanding that is crucial to maintaining international security—especially now that Finland and Sweden are NATO members.
When Minna visited the University of Washington in November 2024, I sat down with her to learn about her research and the Nordic countries’ history with NATO. Her visit was partially funded by a special grant from the Washington State Legislature, “The Finland-Washington Research Exchange Program,” which supports a recently signed Memorandum of Understanding between The Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland and the state of Washington intended to make Finland and Washington safer and more sustainable places to live. During her visit, Minna spoke with students, scholars, and the public about her research. The relevance of her work to current events demonstrates the need for public support to fund researchers like Minna to track current events, analyze them, and to publish on them, so that democratic societies and their allies might continue to make evidence-based policy and security decisions. And hopefully to prevent the next war from ever beginning.
What is hybrid warfare?
Minna: Hybrid warfare is sort of a concept that is supposed to include a lot of different things. You could also call it ‘gray zone aggression’ or ‘below threshold aggression,’ which means that it's aggression that stays below the threshold of armed conflict. And the whole point of hybrid warfare is to sort of wreak havoc, but without triggering a military response by the targeted country.
So, let's say that we take Russia -- that is very often a hybrid actor in, for example, the Nordic Baltic region, but also more widely in Europe -- and they want to attack critical infrastructure in a country. The easiest way basically is to do it via a cyber-attack. But if the country's cyber defences are good enough, then that may not work, and they would need to maybe figure out a way to send some saboteurs to do some actual physical damage to whatever they want to disrupt, and this could be a hospital, this could be transportation, let's say railway links or something logistics, government institutions, or something like that.
So basically the aim is the same here, but it will be two very different types of attack. One would happen in the cyberspace and the other one would be sort of a physical kinetic attack on that critical infrastructure. But the point is sort of to disrupt that infrastructure, but without triggering any military response, so this will be clearly below any, like, threshold of armed conflict.
So as you can hear, it's quite a broad concept, and it has been also criticized for sort of meaning everything and nothing. But I think that it’s actually quite a useful way of really collecting a lot of different weird things that are happening and trying to connect those dots, so that we don't just see individual incidents here and there and struggle to understand why this is happening, but also see, like, maybe these very different things actually follow the same goal, and therefore then sort of connect the dots of, “What is-- what is happening here, and how is it connected?”
Colin: So it sounds like an important method for documenting all these things, if the question is “When is war really starting, and when would we go to war?” that you have some record and understanding of where you stand in your relationship to another country.
Minna: Exactly, yes. And this is actually an incredibly relevant discussion in Europe right now, that, sort of, the lines between war and peace have become increasingly blurred. One would say that in the cyberspace, for example, there is no peace, because attacks are happening all the time, and you have to sort of also expect it. Like, cyber defense is a really minimum requirement at this point. And one could also even say that in the hybrid sphere is almost the same situation at this moment in Europe, because Russia has really ramped up all methods that it has to try and interfere with the societies of the European countries that are supporting Ukraine, but without triggering a military response. So there has been quite a lot of, like, discussion and even heated debates about whether we already are at war with Russia or not, and where that definition of war actually is. And I would say that hybrid warfare could definitely be understood as preparation for an actual kinetic war, in the sense that, of course there is the immediate effects that the aggressor is interested in, such as what I mentioned like interrupting or disrupting a societal function and causing some kind of chaos and sowing fear in the society. But also it could be for the purpose of gathering information about the resilience and preparedness of that society, testing different sort of critical systems, like, what would they need to do in a conflict to knock off, let’s say logistics or some other critical functions in a targeted society?
So I would say that this is definitely happening in this gray zone between war and peace, and that makes it quite hard also to respond to, because usually European countries, like, democratic countries, are quite strict about that sort of delimitation or, like, that difference between war and peace, because then if you do declare something to be a war, that triggers different legislation and emergency laws and so on. And you don't want to cross that threshold very lightly. So that's quite a challenge at the moment, even, like, starting from the definition.
But it's not just like an academic debate, because it would have very concrete, real world consequences, how you define this.
Colin: So what are some of those real world concrete examples that your office has been documenting? You mentioned cyber attacks, but what else? What are the weird, unsettling things?
Minna: Well I have, actually, a very fresh example from just today. So there were news about not only one but two data cables, one between Finland and Germany, and one between, I think, Estonia and Sweden, if I now recall correctly all the details, having been damaged in the Baltic Sea. So these things are really happening almost on a daily basis, and, like, I, for example, just recently published an analysis of both these methods that Russia is using, but also sort of a review of the policy responses to those attacks, and it took a long time to get that out because, like, things were constantly happening, I had to update all the time so that it wouldn't be completely outdated already when it comes out. So that's sort of, like, what's happening right now, but so, these are of course the highest profile cases, when, like, an important data cable or there have been also two gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea that have been damaged.
But then it can include, like, really curious things, such as these two Russian pranksters, Vovan and Lexus, who have been able to prank a lot of Western officials over the course of, like, the past decade or so by impersonating either Russian opposition figures or sometimes Belarussian opposition figures, or often also African Union officials for some reason. And a great number of really high level officials, so like, prime ministers and foreign ministers of, like, at least ten European countries -- and some U.S. officials as well, for example, Bernie Sanders was one of their victims – so, have fallen for these pranks and have had some, like, calls with these pranksters thinking that they are talking to whoever they were impersonating. And I think it's, like, really this is one of the best examples of, like, how bad the sort of information exchange is on the political level, so that they succeed with the same strategy over and over again. And there seems to be very little learning between the governments that have been pranked in this way.
But then there are also more classical things, such as, like, just sort of classic sabotage of critical infrastructure. For example, over the summer we saw a series of attempted or sometimes successful break-ins into water supply facilities in Finland, and also in Sweden in the fall. That also happened in Germany, also in a military base there was a break-in, and then we have seen something like transport containers having some explosive inside them so that -- I think it was in Germany, Poland and in the UK over the summer -- when a container arrived at a DHL logistics point, it would, like, explode or, like, if not explode, but at least, like, go up in fire. We also saw some sabotage of, for example, the French railway network over the Olympics in Paris this summer.
Then we have had more classic sort of, like, disinformation campaigns of various kinds. For example, there had been a really large scale disinformation campaign against Sweden starting in 2021, and the narrative was here that Swedish authorities would be taking away Muslim children from their families based on their ethnicity or religion, and not sort of, like, child protection reasons, because of course this had actually happened, but not, like, systematically against Muslim families. But the disinformation campaign was sort of, like, implying that the Swedish state would be doing this as a sort of anti-Muslim campaign. And this went really viral on social media, especially in the Arabic-speaking social media and also regular media, for example, Al Jazeera was really spreading this narrative and disinformation. And it really got out of hand and the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency stated that this was the largest scale disinformation campaign ever against Sweden.
An interesting fact was that there was a very similar disinformation campaign ten years earlier against Finland, and that was started by Russian media claiming that Finnish authorities would be taking Russian children away from their families. So this was just, like, a new twist of an old narrative, sort of adapted to the Swedish context. But what the point is of this campaign is that it sort of already paved the way for people to believe this kind of things of the Swedish state, that they would actually act in this very systematic anti-Muslim, like, target Muslims in this way.
So then when Sweden was in the process of becoming a NATO member and had some trouble there with Turkey objecting to Swedish membership. And then there were in Sweden some protests against the Turkish President Erdoğan’s policies, especially against the Kurdish minorities. And there were some Qurans burned during this protest, and there were also some single individuals who were burning Qurans sort of to mix it up more and create more problems in this process. And this was also taken up again in a similar fashion, basically claiming that it was the Swedish state that was, like, as a next step now starting to burn Qurans. So it was first the children that were taken away, and now it's the Qurans that are getting burned. And this resulted actually in some violence against Swedish embassies in the Arab-speaking world, for example in Baghdad, the Swedish embassy was stormed and set on fire in the summer 2023 and, very tragically in the fall 2023, three Swedish soccer fans were shot after a match in Brussels, and two of them actually died as a result. And the reason for this shooting was that this was payback for the Quran burnings.
So sometimes it's, like, disinformation is also not isolated or something that is, like, always completely abstract and happening in a different sphere, but it’s also linked, in a way, to these more physical things that are happening, and it can spiral out of control, like, both ways, like, either disinformation into physical violence like this, or then some minor event can spiral into a large-scale misinformation campaign.
Colin: Right. So it really is this gray zone we're looking at: these individual actions can cross the threshold into bloodshed. I'm curious about just, how do you figure out who did these things? You mentioned several different examples of today's news, that a data cable had been cut; do we know who did it? You mentioned prank phone calls to national leaders; how did they fool them? How did they impersonate those people so well, and how do we know who did that? This sounds like a difficult step that has to be come over before a nation can decide how to respond.
Minna: Absolutely. You are actually addressing here the dilemma of the attribution, which is always the first step of a response. Like, first, like, if you want to respond in a way to an attack, you have to first attribute it to an aggressor. And there are different reasons why this sometimes cannot be done, or there's no political willingness to do so.
So, for example in the case of these pranksters, they mostly take the credit themselves. So that’s, like, sort of straightforward enough. It’s also not, like, clearly established that they have any direct link to the Kremlin, it’s just, like, they are just close to the Kremlin, they are also, like, not exactly anti-Putin and so on. So this is a particularly curious case because the question is sort of like, “OK, is it just a prank or does it have something more to do with this, like, Russian hybrid warfare?” And the effect that this has had, for example, is that the officials have been very carelessly speaking about, for example, strategy on the war in Ukraine or strategy in Russian sanctions on Russia or something, so there has been like a lot of information value, actually, in these calls.
Other times, as you mentioned, in these cases of, like, let's say a data cable or a gas pipeline is damaged, it can be much harder to actually find out who did it. And even if you do, then there might not be enough political willingness to attribute it, at least on the political level. So for example, in October 2023, a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia was damaged by a ship that turned out to be sailing under the Hong Kong flag, and it had a quite complex ownership structure that involved both Chinese and Russian nationals. It also switched into Russian hands before sailing off to the Northern Sea route, so away from Europe, so the whole case was a very murky affair in that sense, and it involved both Russia and China. But as it turned out, that it wasn't clearly attributable to Russia in the first place. So, for example, Finnish authorities were able to find out that it was definitely this Chinese or, like, Hong Kong ship called Newnew Polar Bear that had done the damaging. However, the Finnish authorities decided to only attribute it on this technical level, so they did not make any claims about whether it was intentional or accidental. Experts have said that it's quite unlikely that a ship would, like, sort of just be dragging its anchor for four kilometers and like, not notice it, but nevertheless— So this was an example of a technical attribution, but not a political one, which means that there's no direct sort of claim for compensation or some kind of consequences in that sense.
On the other hand, sometimes it's a very clear case. For example, in Finland we have had this situation that Russia started a year ago bringing migrants from the Middle East and Africa to the Finnish border and then pushing them over. And this was, like, very clearly attributable to Russia because, like, obviously it's a Russian border guard who is bringing these people to the border and pushing them over, so there's no lack of clarity in that sense. But, for example, this series of sabotages have been, like, a different thing, so it might be harder to establish that, like, if the individuals are caught who have attempted to do sabotage, like, it might be not so straightforward to prove that they have been working for the Kremlin or as proxies of some other – so, for example, Iran has been using proxies in Sweden recently and, like, Russia's not the only one who is using these strategies, but in those cases it can be harder.
In the cyber sphere it's these days mostly fairly possible to make that connection, like, who is behind these attacks, so attribution is possible there. And sometimes the hacker groups may also just, like, claim the credit for it. But this is a very tricky question, can you gather sufficient evidence to attribute, and if you can, like, do you want to do that politically? Like, are you ready to sort of, like, respond and then also demand a response back and so on? So it’s not at all that straightforward, actually.
Colin: Yeah, so what are the options before the government of Finland when choosing how to respond?
Minna: Well, actually there's like a time before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, so, before February 2022, especially in the case of Finland.
So in Finland it's been sort of like an interesting situation with, like, quite a high level of awareness, especially among the authorities, but also among the population, that Russia is a potentially malign actor and poses a potential threat. But for the sake of, like, trying to manage that threat and those, like, sort of neighborly relations in a proactive way, there was this culture in Finland not to openly talk about the threat that Russia potentially poses.
So there was, for example, this case that a Russian company, Russian-owned company, had been buying a lot of properties in the Finnish archipelago along the coastline and on the islands. And why this was a problem was that Finland is very dependent on the Baltic Sea as a supply line. So about 90% of Finland’s imports and exports go through the Baltic Sea, so it's very important that those sea lines of communication remain open; that would be important for both civilian traffic, but also in a conflict situation. And how this Russian-owned company had been buying this property started looking like they were establishing sort of, like, a monitoring or potentially even a blockading capability there in this archipelago. It was also supposed to be a, like, holiday business, but as it happened, there wasn't much of that sort of vacationing going on in these properties. And so when the Finnish authorities intervened and sort of arrested the owner of this company and confiscated the property, it was done purely based on economic and financial crime allegations, so there was no word of a threat to national security, and this was in 2018. And this process is still ongoing, so it's quite interesting to see what comes out of it in the end, since, like, the political climate has changed after 2022, and there's now like a different sort of political space and willingness to also more openly attribute threats to Russia.
But then there's also, like, you need to be careful not to overcorrect either and sort of, like, to cry wolf and immediately attribute everything to Russia, before there is any evidence. So there's a careful balance to be managed there. So this was especially the case with this Baltic connector gas pipeline, where everybody supposed that it must have been Russia because it seemed like the Russian sort of modus operandi, but then it turned out that it wasn't, and that was, like, sort of a good lesson to make sure that you have the evidence before you make any claims.
Colin: And so that was before 2022 and the war in Ukraine.
Minna: Precisely, this property case in the archipelago, that was in 2018, yeah.
Colin: So how have Finnish responses changed since then?
Minna: Well, they have certainly emboldened, I would say. So for example, now we had recently a very interesting case where— I need to take a step back and explain what one of the main problems in responding to these hybrid attacks is, and on the one hand it is the multitude of possible, sort of, attack vectors, basically, as I've described, but also that most of these strategies that, let’s say, Russia employs here are criminal in nature, and therefore, let's say that Russian agents successfully sabotage, like, critical infrastructure in Finland. So obviously Finland will not send saboteurs to Russia to sabotage critical infrastructure there because, like, that's not how democratic countries that value rule of law work. So there's often this problem of asymmetry in the options [for] how to respond, and that makes it, like, quite tricky for democratic governments. They need to be quite creative about how to go about this, like, how to find ways to respond that are strong enough, but still within our own legal framework and rule of law. So what Finland did recently, and this is not, like, directly connected to any particular Russian attack, but it's just a way of imposing costs on Russia. And this is often the biggest problem, so, Western countries may be able to sort of deny the impact of these attacks by increasing resilience and preparedness and making sure that, if there is an attack, it doesn't cause any disruptions and therefore, like, is pointless, but then the question of how to actually impose costs on the aggressor, that's, like, often much harder and requires a different kind of boldness that many countries may not have right now politically.
But so Finland found this way of starting to confiscate, not property owned by Russian individuals, but by the Russian Federation, the state. And how Finland did this was that they found as a legal basis, this claim, compensation claim by a Ukrainian energy company called Naftogaz that has sued the Russian Federation for €5 billion in compensation for the loss of revenue and infrastructure on Crimea since the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014. And so Finland basically used this as a legal basis to confiscate Russian Federation assets in Finland. And basically, if, at the end of probably quite lengthy juridical process, these properties were sold, Naftogaz would basically get the profits, and that would contribute towards this compensation claim. And actually the assets that Finland has so far confiscated are worth approximately 4 billion, so this would already almost be the full compensation claim.
And obviously Finland has its own interest, national interest, in doing this, but this was quite a clever way of legally making it also sort of beneficial to Ukraine and this company. And the background story to this is that Finland had tried to confiscate some Russian Federation properties in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, already in 2023, but they had to release the properties again because there was no legal basis for the confiscation, since the Western sanctions only applied to Russian individuals but not the state. So this was sort of like a way to get around that limitation.
So I think that this is by far the boldest move that Finland has ever made. And the interesting thing is that the Finnish authorities have — so the political leadership has not commented on this at all, and they say that this is a purely technical, purely judicial process and they have nothing to do with this, although obviously it's also, like, a very political decision. But it's sort of, like, kept strictly as an allegedly purely technical move, so that has been quite a clever way of going about this in a way that is perfectly in line with our own legal frameworks in the West.
Colin: It sounds extremely difficult because you're trying to make sure that your rights don't get abused, and so you want to have some kind of response, but you also don't want to escalate the situation towards war. And so trying to find a way to respond that is within your means, but maybe also isn't going to compromise who you are as a nation. Has that always worked for Finland? Have there been stress cases where maybe there has been some domestic opposition to a response that the government has taken?
Minna: Yes definitely. So there have been several cases where what I mentioned earlier, there's been sort of, like, maybe the tendency to overcompensate or, like, overcorrect for having been so cautious in the past. So for example, in 2020 Finland brought back this old legislation that requires third country nationals — and in the European context that means citizens of countries outside of the European Union and the European Economic Area, so, for example, Russian nationals or American nationals as well, theoretically — to seek a permit from the Ministry of Defense in certain cases, if they want to buy property in Finland. So this law has been in place, again, since 2020, and now this government has — the Finnish government that is currently in power — has also drafted a law that would prohibit or, like, prevent Russian nationals whatsoever from buying any property in Finland, so not even, like, on a case-by-case method but just a general ban, which, of course, can be problematic in many ways.
There was also some talk last year about maybe banning dual citizenship for Finnish-Russian nationals, and this is quite problematic because, like, very often it's nearly impossible to get rid of the Russian citizenship even if you wanted to, so it's not really the people's fault if they still, like, have the citizenship and they can't get rid of it. So that was also somewhat problematic.
And then in this case of the instrumentalized migration — so Russia has been now again since 2023, been bringing migrants to the finished border — and in this case, it has been a very difficult dilemma to deal with because there is no sort of clean way or, like, a clean solution, both morally, legally, and in terms of national security, to deal with this issue. And there are trade-offs in this that just, like, can't be avoided.
So, for example, Finland now has recently, in the summer, attempted to legalize illegal pushback. So this problem of pushback has become almost like a norm in Europe, not only at the border to Russia, but also on the southern border, because there has been, like, a really strong sort of migration pressure to Europe since 2015, basically. So what Finland attempted was sort of to try and legalize this procedure that is just not compatible with the current international law and human rights, for example. So the right to asylum is a human right, so you can't really legalise taking it away in certain cases. So Finland did this as an exemption to the Finnish Constitution, because obviously this was also in violation of the Finnish Constitution. It's a limited period, so for 12 months and then like exceptional emergency law that could be triggered if needed, if the situation got more dire at the border. But this was for example a case where many Finns were of the opinion that this goes too far and that, like, we should not sort of prioritize national security at the expense of our values, and especially not at the expense of the international rules-based order, which of course, like, international law and human rights are an important basis of— because as a small country, Finland has a direct security interest, even, in keeping up that rules-based international order that guarantees the right to exist and right to sovereignty to all countries, regardless of their size. So of course, like, for some people in Finland it was, it went too far, and they considered this to be a dangerous, like, slippery slope, to start yourself undermining that rules-based order.
However, there was this competing security interest, which was the immediate national security. So if Russia had kept bringing, like, thousands of people every day to the border and had managed to completely overwhelm the Finnish authorities by doing so, caused also like a lot of costs in terms of, like, dealing with the issue, or there was also this concern that there could be so-called ‘little green men’ among these people, so that the refugees and migrants would be required to maybe commit acts of sabotage once in Finland, or so on. So there were, like, several reasons why this was also, sort of, a justified concern to the security authorities and why there were reasons not to want to encourage people to choose this route to come to Finland.
The Finnish border has also been closed for a year now -- the Finnish-Russian border, not the whole Finnish border, but all the crossing points there. But this has been a really difficult balancing act in the sense that there are even competing security interests here, one being the rules-based order and the other one being, like, the more direct national security threat that this can pose. And then there's, like, this moral dimension that then at some point people started questioning, like, is this all still, like, proportional to the threat, or would there be other ways of dealing with this in a more sort of legal way or, like, that is more in accordance with our legal framework?
But this has also led to discussion in Finland and some other European countries about whether international law is still up-to-date because, of course, when the Declaration on Human Rights was written, maybe people didn't foresee that some countries would act so cynically as Russia is doing and instrumentalizing and weaponizing people's wish to flee their country in this fashion. So there's been also this conversation, but obviously it's not, like, very easy to change international law, and it can be a Pandora's box that you don't want to open, so it's very complicated actually.
Colin: It sounds like it has led to a lot of genuine debate in Finland.
Minna: Definitely.
Colin: You mentioned earlier that one of the effects of this hybrid warfare is that it can lead to— you said chaos, or to fear or panic. Is this what you're referring to?
Minna: Precisely. So for example, in Finland, I would say that the Finnish authorities were quite good at deterring Russia from accelerating this operation. Russia has not kept pushing people to the border after Finland closed it, so the physical effects have been very limited. But on the other hand, in the information sphere, Russia was — it wasn't very hard for Russia to reach its goals, which were sort of, like, polarizing a public opinion on the topic, causing a very sort of, like, toxic debate on this, and sort of also triggering this kind of xenophobia in the Finnish society and also triggering this kind of almost existential fear that now something bigger is starting. So there I think that you could really notice that, although Finland is quite a resilient country and society and authorities regularly sort of analyze our legal frameworks and whether there are some loopholes or vulnerabilities and so on, but there is still limits to, like, the Finnish people's sort of understanding of how these operations work on different levels, and people responded to different dimensions of this operation. Some only saw the direct threat to national security. Others were concerned about this, like, legal ramifications of these response methods. And others did also consider the possible cost of human suffering if people had, for example, died at the border. It was a very cold winter. That luckily didn't happen, but it has happened, for example, along the Polish-Belarussian border.
There are unfortunately, like — this was an operation with which Russia was able to reach potentially multiple goals: more physically, this, like, overwhelming the authorities, causing some actual like concrete security threats within Finland, so those didn't work, but then also sort of, like, the evergreen sort of pointing out Western hypocrisy when it comes to human rights, and, like, their selective application, or galvanizing public opinion and polarizing it. And Finland is very characterized by a strong consensus culture on what comes to national security, but there the consensus totally broke. And that was, I would say, definitely a win for Russia.
Colin: So one of the big questions you brought up is, is this war? And you've come up with a new term hybrid war to be able to describe how this is something different. The goal, I'm sure, is always to hope that we prevent the world from getting to actual war. My question is maybe a bit more of a meta question because, it's always important to be prepared for war, but it's also important how we talk about war, and I feel like there's a paradox that maybe the more you talk about war preparedness, the more likely war will be, but that if you don't talk about war preparedness ever, then you’re not prepared when it comes. Do you have thoughts about that and what the discourse is in Finland right now regarding that?
Minna: I would say that even more important than, like, whether or not you talk about preparing for a war is whether you actually are prepared or not. And Finland is an interesting case because we never ever used to talk about, like, preparing for any potential, like, act of aggression, but we nevertheless did that all the time. So until 2022, there was this, as I mentioned, this peculiar Finnish way of sort of always preparing for the eventuality that Russia could again pose a threat to Finland, a military threat, but it wasn't ever mentioned in so many words. So for example, if you look at Finnish government reports on foreign security and defense policy from the early 2000s, which was this sort of more optimistic era when there was, like, sort of hope in Europe that maybe relations with Russia can become sort of, like, productive, and sort of, war is behind us now in Europe, and so on. But even back then, it was never fully excluded in the Finnish government reports that Finland could be subjected to an armed attack.
And of course, it was never mentioned that, like, the likely aggressor would be Russia, because that was not politically correct to do. But everybody knew it in Finland, and this was sort of like a subtle way of not talking about it, but nevertheless preparing. So Finland, for example, kept up conscription after the Cold War, and this kind of, like, territorial defense capability, which most European countries got rid of after the Cold War because they didn't expect to need it ever again. There was this belief in this sort of peace dividend and that Europe had sort of overcome the face of wars on the continent. But in Finland one could almost say that the Cold War sort of didn't quite end, and based on the Finnish assessment of Russian developments in Russia, there was never quite occasion to completely let down our guard and, like, assume that Russia will never pose a threat again. So that's why Finland kept up a lot of those sort of national preparedness systems that most countries actually used to have in the Cold War in Europe but dismantled after it and sort of assumed that wars will from now on happen somewhere far away and be sort of, like, optional whether or not you want to be participating in them through sort of, like, different missions and operations.
So I would say that in that sense, Finland has been a very interesting case, and there's been an interesting contrast between, for example, Sweden and Finland, which are otherwise two fairly similar and very comparable countries in many ways. But Sweden, for example, went all in on dismantling its armed forces after the Cold War and did not expect to sort of, like, need to defend its territory anymore. And it has been quite a slow and painful process in Sweden to try and build up that military capability again. And in Sweden, the discourse has been much more open; there have been several warnings by top leadership in Sweden saying that war cannot be excluded and it can happen that we will be at war with Russia in some near future.
And this caused also some confusion in Finland: there was this sense like, why are they talking about this in such a different way than we in Finland? Like, do they know something that we don't know? Because the Finnish assessment was sort of exactly the opposite, in a way, because the Swedes would say that it's the worst security situation since the Second World War, whereas in Finland the assessment is sort of like, it's almost kind of never been better since Independence [in] 1917, because Russia's actually pulled so many troops and so much military equipment from the Finnish border away to Ukraine. So there's actually much less Russian military capability at the Finnish border now than there was before the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. So in that sense, Finland and Sweden have been a little bit on different planets when it comes to this. And it also of course has to do with the fact that the Finnish Defense forces have probably never been as well equipped as they are now. Plus the NATO membership is considered also to really, like, contribute to making war less likely in Finland, whereas in Sweden it's a different situation because they are not very well prepared, and now the security environment is in many ways much worse than it has ever been for Sweden in a very long time. So in Finland, for example, there was some confusion about why the Swedes were talking about this in such a different fashion, but it’s sort of explained by the different levels of preparedness in the country and also different political needs to communicate this to the population.
So Sweden hasn't been at war for 200 years. It was neutral even during the World Wars and managed to sort of, like, more or less stay out of them and wasn't, like, a party to the World Wars at all. So the Swedish population is very unaccustomed at this point, sort of, to thinking that war is a realistic possibility. They have their own word for this which means, like, ‘peace-damage,’ that they have been, like, sort of ‘peace-damaged’ and, like, can't wrap their heads around, like this idea that there could be war again. So it's a very different sort of point of departure in Sweden than in Finland and therefore leads to very different political communication. In Finland this would be probably considered, like, irresponsible fear mongering and that you would have to have some really serious grounds and some really serious evidence to say such things.
Colin: That sounds like a good opportunity to switch over talking about NATO membership. Sweden and Finland were not founding members of NATO. Norway and Denmark were, so Sweden and Finland stand out a little bit from their Nordic neighbors. Why weren't they part of the alliance from the beginning?
Minna: So in the case of Sweden, Sweden had been neutral already since the Napoleonic Wars, so since about 1814, not anymore party to any conflict and armed conflict. So Sweden had figured that this strategy of neutrality had actually worked out quite well for Sweden and therefore wanted to stick to it also in the Cold War and try to stay outside of this Bloc confrontation. There was a big major lobbying effort to convince Sweden that they should also join NATO when it was founded, but the Swedes stuck to their neutrality. For Norway and Denmark it was a very different situation because their experience of the Second World War had been so vastly different. So both countries had been occupied by Nazi Germany, whereas Sweden had actually allowed Nazi Germany to use its territory and had been trading with both sides and, like most neutral countries sometimes may do, sort of, like, really stay in the middle of it, or, like, at equidistance, in a way. And there was actually an attempt at founding or establishing Scandinavian defense union among the three Scandinavian countries, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, but Sweden wanted the Scandinavian defense union to be neutral in this Bloc confrontation, so not clearly part of the West, but sort of try to stay outside of this East-West conflict. And this was not an option to Norway and Denmark, where trust in Sweden after the experience that Sweden had in a way allowed Nazi Germany to use its territory and in that way also to an extent aided the occupation of Norway and Denmark. So trust was in short supply there, and staying neutral was definitely not an option for Norway and Denmark, so that's why they then ended up becoming founding members of NATO.
And Finland was in a very different situation because Finland had fought two wars against the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Finland had been part of the Soviet sphere of influence in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. So the Soviet Union then invaded Finland in 1939 in an attempt to make Finland also a part of the Soviet Union. However, Finland was able to resist this invasion and managed to defend its sovereignty and independence. But there was another war right after, the Continuation War, where Finland attempted at taking back some of those territories that the Soviet Union had occupied and were given away in the peace treaty after the Winter War. And so Finland was in a very different situation because, like, although it had successfully defended its sovereignty and independence from the Soviet Union in these two wars, it had nevertheless not won those wars in terms of losing a lot of territory to the Soviet Union and having to sign peace treaties that were quite disadvantageous for Finland at that time. Finland had to pay high war reparations to the Soviet Union and so on. And all of this also included a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, which Finland signed in 1948, which included that, in the case of an attack by Germany or its allies — which after Germany, West Germany joined NATO in 1955, meant all of NATO — so Finland was supposed to defend against an attack by Germany against either Finland or the Soviet Union, so defend its own territory, either independently or with the support of the Soviet Union. And this of course created significant limitations on Finland’s ability to sort of integrate with Western powers, like, that was completely excluded during the Cold War and even Sweden was considered sort of ‘Western enough,’ so that was not an option.
So Finland was completely out of this equation throughout the Cold War officially, but the Nordic countries nevertheless did cooperate, also in the field of security and defense, and especially the intelligence services cooperated quite a lot, but that was all, like, very top secret, basically, and, like, it was not supposed to happen based on that Sweden was also neutral and Finland was neutral, but it took place behind the scenes nevertheless.
Colin: So the effect of it is that it placed a bit of a buffer between Russia and Western states as well. What started to change the thinking for both Finns and for Swedes?
Minna: Well, I would say that after the Cold War, well, Swedes had just sort of gotten very used to their status as a neutral country and, although after joining the EU in 1995, both Finland and Sweden officially abandoned neutrality, at least politically, because they considered that after having joined the EU they could not claim political neutrality anymore — interestingly, Austria also joined in the same year, and Austria still feels perfectly neutral, militarily, which Finland and Sweden did not —
Colin: So wait, just to jump in— joining the EU, would that be considered sort of an escalating action of choosing one side over the other? Were there missed opportunities for exchange between Sweden and Finland and other European nations during the Cold War as a result of this?
Minna: So for Finland, the situation was, during the Cold War, for example, that Finland could not join the European integration process because Finland had sort of, I would say, a little bit limited sovereignty in the foreign policy decisions. So, the Soviet Union had to sort of agree to whatever Finland wanted to do because Finland tried to balance it to keep, sort of, like, to emphasize this rhetoric of friendship between Finland and Soviet Union to avoid the Soviet Union resorting to violent solutions such as in Czechoslovakia or Hungary in the 50s and 60s where [the] Soviet Union actually militarily intervened. So Finland, for example, did join the European Free Trade Area, which the Soviet Union basically considered, like, unpolitical enough, but it implied that Finland always had to keep a balance between the eastern trade with Soviet Union and the western trade through this EFTA.
And Sweden followed a similar policy. So, because for Sweden it was also important to be politically neutral, so they didn't join the EU either at that time. So this happened only after the Cold War for both countries. And so there was a lot of talk, especially in Finland, about whether Finland should also take the opportunity to join NATO at the same time. But at the time, the political leadership in Finland decided that it was not the right time to do that, because the EU integration process was already quite consuming in terms of political capacity and also administrative capacity, and they figured that their political capital also, like, wasn't enough to also push through the NATO membership, because the referendum on the EU membership in Finland had been already sort of tight. So they wanted to make sure that the EU was priority and that that integration process was fully completed before thinking about NATO. And then I would say that, in the early 2000s, the war in Iraq was very unpopular in Finland and also in Sweden, and there was the sense that ‘We don't want to be part of an alliance where you can potentially get dragged into something questionable like that.’ So NATO's popularity was also very low in terms of, like, public opinion. And then there was, of course, the question, like, why in 2014, Finland and Sweden still did not sort of get the memo and, like, join NATO.
In the Swedish case, it was that, like, Sweden just wasn't ready to give up the neutrality. It was even, still in 2022, it was quite a difficult internal process, especially in the Social Democratic Party in Sweden that was in power at the time, to accept that this was a new reality, because the whole sort of Social Democratic Party's DNA in Sweden had been, like, this neutrality and the the third way foreign policy that it enabled, sort of, during the Cold War, and being this sort of moral superpower in the world. And they had a really hard time accepting that they would have to pick a side and, like, join NATO and this was the new reality.
So in 2014, what happened in both Finland and Sweden was that both countries started increasing their cooperation with NATO. They joined, for example, this enhanced Opportunity Partners program and started really, like, taking part in more exercises with NATO countries and, sort of, on the military level getting closer and closer to NATO, filling any gaps in the standards and making sure that, as you say, in military terms, that the Finnish and Swedish defense forces were fully interoperable with NATO, meaning that they had adopted all the NATO standards and so on. And obviously, politically, Finland and Sweden were, like, already up to standard being democratic countries with strong rule of law and so on.
So from 2014 onwards, one could say that the preparation for possible membership application started, and Finland and Sweden both sort of wanted to make sure that there would be no obstacles on their side if they wanted to join NATO or needed to do so in a fast process. This was at least true for Finland. Sweden was maybe a little bit more — their long term Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist, for example, tried to sort of solve the NATO problem by creating a network of bilateral defense cooperation partnerships with different countries and hoped to sort of, like, mitigate the need to join NATO in that way. Unsurprisingly, he is from the Social Democratic Party. So that was his way of, like, this Hultqvist doctrine was the Swedish Social Democratic way of trying to get around joining NATO in that sense.
Colin: So bilateral agreements just mean, ‘We'll have independent agreements with individual countries so that we will come to each other's aid if there is war —
Minna: Yes, precisely.
Colin: — but without joining NATO, which has that structure.
Minna: Yes, exactly, and also some multilateral format such as the Nordic Defense Cooperation format, or this format led by the United Kingdom called Joint Expeditionary Force, which brings together the Baltic States, Nordic countries, and the Netherlands, and it's sort of, like, doing operative work together. So there were different ways to work around the NATO membership that Sweden was trying to explore. But in the end, like, Finland made it quite clear in 2022 that none of this is enough because none of these partnerships have any binding security guarantees and it's only NATO in Europe that really offers that kind of level of binding guarantee.
Colin: Right, because Article 5 says that if one country is invaded, then all others will come to the mutual aid, in that defense. And that is an important element for defense for countries that have much smaller populations than other countries.
Minna: Yes. Exactly, yes.
Colin: You mentioned Sweden seeing itself as a moral superpower, and my understanding [is] that that has been an international reputation that they have tried to cultivate because they don't have the numbers of people to be a great superpower militarily. And so they have tried to, if not be one of the great nations, at least be one of the good nations.
Minna: Yes, exactly
Colin: And so try to have this reputation as a moral superpower. You mentioned that maybe being a bit of a challenge for some people in the process of applying for and joining NATO. Do you have a sense now for whether this will complicate Sweden's position in having that kind of role in the world stage or, as a Finn from Finland, what's your perspective on, like, is that a role that Finland has played in the past and can continue to play into the future?
Minna: So I would say that NATO membership per se is clearly not an obstacle to playing a peace mediator role. Or, like, if we only think about Norway and its international reputation as very active in different peace processes, and also the Nobel Peace Prize and otherwise sort of having this long term foreign policy that has facilitated a lot of peace processes and so on. So being a NATO member per se is not necessarily an obstacle to that. In the Swedish case, it was really sort of this Cold War phenomenon, when Sweden used that space that it had sort of, especially in the what was back then called the Third World, so, outside of the Western and the Eastern Bloc, a lot of what we would now call the so-called Global South — I know it's not a great term, but, like, lacking a better one right now — so Sweden was quite active, it has had a very active development policy, for example, been a very active development aid actor and has quite a good reputation in in many countries where it has been playing a big role. And yes, so this was one of the reasons that Sweden had this particular approach that was so linked to the neutrality. And in Finland it was also, to an extent, the debate, especially, like, what has been sort of an issue in Finland and Sweden, has been nuclear weapons. Because obviously NATO is a nuclear alliance, and the deterrence, the collective deterrence that NATO offers its members is based on the US nuclear deterrent.
And there was some talk about, like, especially because Sweden went through this very interesting development during the Cold War that, in the beginning of the Cold War Sweden had its own nuclear weapons program, but then it abandoned it in the in the early 70s because the US also, as a part of the US non-proliferation efforts, offered Sweden sort of, like, secret security assurances and sort of, like, offered to take Sweden under the so-called nuclear umbrella in an unofficial way, so that Sweden would give up its own program. And Sweden then developed into one of the strongest proponents of non-proliferation in the world. And there have been, like, discussions, for example, in this regard, whether Finland and Sweden can still pursue, credibly pursue this, if they are part of a nuclear alliance.
But I think that there isn't necessarily, like, a discrepancy between acknowledging that nuclear weapons exist and that of course, like, it's nice to strive towards a world where they wouldn't, but as long as they do exist, you have to also sort of, like, have some kind of a strategy, [so] that you don't become a subject to nuclear blackmail, let's say, as we have seen over Russia's war in Ukraine. So there have been some issues here, but actually they are fairly resolvable. It’s just been, I would say, a deeper identity crisis to Sweden, where neutrality was such an essential sort of part of its identity and Swedes’ own understanding of what their role and identities in the world [were], whereas in Finland it was more just a pragmatic solution and neutrality was anyways the best that we could get in the Cold War times because other options weren't really available. That was also a way for Finland to emphasize that Finland was not a part of the Soviet Union, but an independent country, so it was sort of a more pragmatic solution in a difficult situation than anything that Finland would have consciously chosen as its foreign policy.
I can also say something about, like, what kind of an impact this had had on the alignment of the Nordic countries and this kind of — how this has, on the other hand, also become an identity question. Oh, that's actually something that I should maybe add, that there was on the one hand for Sweden in this process of deciding whether or not to follow Finland in the membership application to NATO, there was, on the one hand, this long term identity as a neutral country, but on the other hand, Sweden's identity as a Nordic country sort of made it imperative to join NATO once Finland decided to do so, because Sweden would have otherwise been the only country outside of NATO in the Nordic region, and that sort of wouldn't do. So this Nordic identity actually also played an important role, and that was really interesting to see how that played into the process. And actually there was also this more direct link to Finland as well: so already in the beginning of the Cold War, when Finland didn't have the option to join NATO in the first place and Sweden decided not to do so either, part of their argument why they could not join NATO was that that would have left Finland in a really difficult position as this only sort of, like, neutral buffer between the Soviet Union and NATO, if Sweden had been a NATO country. And therefore the Swedish assessment was that, in that case, the Soviet Union would have very likely tried to invade Finland again and get Finland completely into its sphere of influence. So that was one of the reasons, and I find it very interesting how the, especially the Swedish Social Democratic Party, has always partially outsourced the political responsibility for their NATO membership question to Finland. So during the Cold War, it was like, ‘We can't join because Finland can't join,’ and then once Finland decided to join, they basically said, like, ‘Well, now we have to join because Finland is joining.’ So the then Swedish Foreign Minister allegedly reportedly once said in the spring of 2022, “Damn Finns, now we may also have to join NATO.” So I found it very sort of intriguing, like, how there was this link between Finland and Sweden also in terms of the NATO question and the neutrality in the Cold War.
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Colin: Crossing North is a production of the Scandinavian Studies Department and Baltic Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Today’s episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Colin Gioia Connors. Special thanks to the Washington State Legislature and its taxpayers for helping to make this episode and Minna Ålander’s visit possible. Today’s music was used with permission by Kristján Hrannar Pálsson. Complete transcripts for every episode of Crossing North can be found at scandinavian.washington.edu, where you can learn more about the podcast and other exciting projects hosted by the Scandinavian Studies Department. If you are a current or prospective student, consider taking a course or declaring a major. All members of the public, including high school students, are now eligible to enroll in individual summer courses offered by the Department of Scandinavian Studies. You can find complete course listings for the Scandinavian Studies Department and Baltic Studies Program at scandinavian.washington.edu. Once again, that’s scandinavian.washington.edu.
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SHOW NOTES
Release date: February 19, 2025
This episode was written, edited, and produced by Colin Gioia Connors.
Theme music used with permission by Kristján Hrannar Pálsson.