Finland will join NATO as its 31st member after Turkey’s parliament decided to accept the country’s application.
Finland’s application to join the Western defense alliance had been put off for months by Turkey, which claimed the Nordic country supported “terrorists.”
Sweden, which submitted a Nato membership application around the same time last year, is still being denied due to identical grievances with Ankara.
All of NATO’s members must support any enlargement.
At Nato’s upcoming summit, which will take place in July in Lithuania, Finland will now be properly inducted.
Following the Turkish vote, the Finnish government released a statement in which it said that joining the alliance will increase both the security and stability of Finland as well as the Baltic and Northern European regions.
Earlier in March, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan endorsed Finland’s application, complementing the nation for its “genuine and concrete actions” toward Turkish security.
But it was obvious that he still harbored animosity for Sweden since he accused it once more of supporting Kurdish rebels and permitting them to march through Stockholm.
The addition of Finland as the seventh NATO member state on the Baltic Sea will further cut off Russia’s access to the sea in St. Petersburg and its tiny exclave of Kaliningrad.
Finland’s decision was previously denounced by Russia’s Foreign Ministry as being poorly thought through and motivated by hysteria toward the Russian people.
Yet the Russian invasion of Ukraine has drastically changed Finnish public sentiment and, ultimately, its choice to join NATO.
Support for joining NATO increased dramatically overnight, rising from a meager one-third of Finns to nearly 80%.
Finland merely thinks that by joining the alliance, it will have a better chance of avoiding a Russian invasion.
