Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spurred an unprecedented increase in Finnish defence spending.
Helsingin Sanomat wrote that the Finnish Defence Forces (FDF) are using their extra money for huge investment in procurement, purchasing domestic and imported weapons systems.
Additional funding for the FDF was announced in the spring, totalling an extra 2.2 billion euros for the coming years.
“We are now buying at such a pace, and the amount of money we have received is quite exceptional,” government adviser Iikka Marttila from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) told HS.
An additional 700 million euros has been available for this year, with an additional 800 million next year, followed by 400-500 million per year.
HS wrote that this is just the beginning of Finland’s spending spree—which in the past year has purchased everything from F-35 fighter jets to anti-tank missile systems.
Much of this additional funding has been used for procuring new weapons platforms and does not include the actual defence budget, which has risen by one billion euros to 6.1 billion euros.
HS noted that the pace and volume of Finland’s weapons procurement is unprecedented in peacetime.
“There has never been anything like this before,” Marttila noted.
Marttila pointed out that Finland is preparing for a war based on what it has seen in Ukraine.
“The war in Ukraine has shown that a defender must have a sufficient number of systems and ammunition at its disposal in all situations. When war breaks out, so many countries are trying to augment their defence capabilities simultaneously. This causes supply bottlenecks and price increases,” he explained.
Europe goes shopping.
Oh brother, can you spare a dime?
He’s forgetting Kosovo/Serbia, though. Let’s not forget where the Great War started over a century ago…
Yeah, Kosovo/Serbia is the one I’m most concerned about. I can absolutely believe Putin and his lot being dumb enough to think that starting a “second front” in the form of another war in the Balkans would help them to win in Ukraine; and I’m very worried that some Serbian politicians and military leaders might be dumb enough to go for it, thinking that the rest of the Europe (plus USA) can’t or won’t intervene to stop them.
They might not, under the doctrine that “those people in the Balkans” are less European than other Europeans… The idea of “ancient hatreds” is so deeply baked into western European/US thinking about the region, that they did not make any attempts to intercede or try and uproot the problems caused by the rise of virulent nationalism and ethnic essentialism. But that’s probably because the ideology that is animating the conflicts there are far too close for comfort (and in fact are the same thing, really) for how we think about national identity, ethnicity, and race in general, that far too many of us are loath to unpack.
That’s definitely a risk. I’d like to think that such a conflict would be seen as a proxy war started by Russia (no matter how much they really were involved), but international politics has all too many chances of serious disappointment.
Let’s hope it won’t get anywhere beyond blustering and some saber-rattling.
It’s not, though I’m sure Putin is encouraging the Serbian government to double down. There is forces there that aren’t really puppets of Putin or (as some believe) of the west. The problem with the proxy war idea is that it ignores other actors, especially local actors and assumes that they have no agency outside of the “great powers” as it were. I don’t think that was helpful thinking for what happened during the Cold War, and it’s not particularly helpful now. The west and Russian can certainly have an important material impact on this possible conflict, but it’s just at their dictate.
Like Syria. There’s lots of wars going on there. Obviously Turkey, Russia, US and other NATO countries, Israel, and Iran are all backing factions or fighting on the ground or from the air, but there’s a bewildering amount more going on.
Yeah. I think far too often, unless we’re directly involved, we expect things (especially in the global south and other parts of the world that some Europeans saw as “less civilized” over the modern era) to be neat and tidy, and to primarily be down to whatever the “great powers” are doing… But that’s just now how us human beings actually function.
