Just hours after Vladimir Putin grinned to young Russian entrepreneurs about regaining territory stolen from Russia, the President of Finland unexpectedly canceled dinner with the King of Sweden on a distant Finnish island.
‘During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn’t capture anything; he took back what had always belonged to us, even if all of Europe recognized it as Sweden’s,’ Putin told his young audience.
‘It appears that it is now our turn to reclaim our territories,’ he said with a smile.
Midway through a day commemorating 100 years of demilitarized autonomy, Finnish President Sauli Niinistö and his wife Jenni Haukio flew home by helicopter from the islands of land.
The meal with Sweden’s King Carl Gustav XVI and Queen Silvia had been canceled.
The royal couple waited for the commencement of an evening concert but left halfway through, according to Expressen.
Russian frigates have began an exercise in the Baltic Sea near the coast of Kaliningrad, according to local news outlets. In the region, NATO is also conducting exercises.
The Land Islands are a Swedish-speaking region of Finland located near the mouth of the Bay of Bothnia, which divides the two countries.
They have been demilitarized since the 1850s Land War between Britain and France on one side and Russia on the other, which took place against the backdrop of the Black Sea’s Crimean War.
Should Russia chose to take preventive action against its Scandinavian neighbors over their NATO membership efforts, it would be a crucial geopolitical battleground in the Baltic Sea, along with the Swedish island of Gotland.
Shivers will run down Scandinavian spines when Putin mentions the several conflicts with Sweden in which Peter the Great successfully fought the Swedish Empire off the continent.
The proximity of Russian forces to the heads of state of Finland and Sweden on an undefended island may have caused their quick evacuation, according to news that the Russian Baltic Fleet had deployed out of Kaliningrad earlier in the day.
Russian Baltic Fleet Zubr-class Landing Craft Air Cushions (hovercraft) and some corvettes were seen leaving Kaliningrad, a strongly militarized Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania.
Despite the fact that the guests at the 100th anniversary celebrating dinner for the independence of the land had been advised that their Finnish host would have to leave unexpectedly, they had planned to stay for the gala concert at the end of the evening.
The suddenness of the king’s departure was downplayed by sources in Sweden, who said the departure time was pre-planned.
Two Finnish F/A-18 Hornet jets took part in operations of the Joint Expeditionary Force training event with a pair of British Typhoons over Helsinki today, transforming the Baltic into a focus of military activity in recent weeks.
While a fierce war rages a thousand miles to the south in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the Baltic is also a high-stakes situation that might spiral out of control.
Boris Johnson agreed last month to a massive new military pact with Sweden and Finland, under which the UK would come to their help militarily if they were attacked by Putin’s forces while applying to join NATO.
When asked if British troops could be dispatched to Finland in the event of a Russian invasion, Prime Minister David Cameron replied, ‘Yes, we will come to each other’s rescue, even with military assistance.’
Much of the Kremlin’s apparent justification for launching a deadly invasion, which they have dubbed a’special military operation,’ has been weakened by Putin’s words about retaking land “that belongs to Russia.”
While the claimed grounds for the invasion are to ‘de-nazify’ and demilitarize Ukraine, which they accuse of abuses against Russian-speaking minorities in the country’s east, it appears that Putin has accidentally disclosed that the invasion is little more than a conquest war.
Putin has previously declared that Ukraine is a historical part of Russia, and that Ukrainians are “little Russians.” He appears to be averse to allowing them to take a course that leads away from Russian dominance.
Such thinking is based on a 19th-century imperialistic worldview in which Great Powers spread their influence and conquer their neighbors.
Respect for national sovereignty and self-determination was designed to prevent greater nations from conquering and eating up smaller powers, as was seen most recently in 1940, with the foundation of the United Nations in 1945 and the United Nations Charter.