Moscow has said it will be forced to strengthen its defenses in the Baltic Sea if Finland and Sweden join NATO, including through the deployment of nuclear weapons, as Ukraine’s war enters its seventh week.
Former President Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said on Thursday that Russia would strengthen all its forces in the region if the two Scandinavian countries join the US-led alliance.
Finland and Sweden are discussing whether to give up decades of non-alignment and join NATO, with leaders of the two Nordic countries saying Russia’s offensive against Ukraine has changed Europe’s “entire security landscape”.
Joining the alliance would more than double Russia’s land border with NATO members, Medvedev said. “Naturally, we will have to strengthen these borders by strengthening the region’s ground, air and naval defenses,” he said.
Map of NATO countries, color-coded by year of accession
Medvedev, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, has explicitly raised the nuclear threat, saying Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership would mean “there can be no more talk of a nuclear-free Baltic Sea status: the balance must be restored.”
“Russia has not taken such measures and will not do so,” he said. “But if our hand is forced, well… note that we did not propose this.” Russia borders the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad is sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.
Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said on Wednesday that Finland, which shares a 1,300km (810 miles) border with Russia, is likely to decide to apply for NATO “within weeks”, while Swedish counterpart Magdalena Anderson said there was no point in postponing the decision there.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces that withdrew from northern Ukraine after failing to seize the capital were “increasing their activities on the southern and eastern fronts in retaliation for their defeats.”
Deputy Defense Minister Hana Malyar said on Thursday that Russia was gathering troops along the border between Russia and Ukraine, Belarus and the breakaway Transnistrian region of Moldova, with the eastern cities of Kharkov, Donetsk and Zaporozhye under missile attack.
The United States has unveiled a new military aid package, including armored personnel carriers and helicopters, saying it is seeking to provide Ukraine with weapons that will give it “greater range and range” before the expected attack.
Moscow said on Thursday that its flagship in the Black Sea, Moscow, had been “severely damaged” by an explosion caused, according to the defense ministry, by munitions detonated “as a result of a fire”. Ukraine says the cruiser was hit by a missile.
Although the defense ministry later said the fire had been put out, news of the loss overshadowed Russian claims of progress in the devastated southern port city of Mariupol, largely reduced to rubble by a brutal six-week bombing that the local mayor said killed more than 21 000 civilians.
Russia said on Wednesday that more than 1,000 Ukrainian Marines had surrendered in the city, later adding that the port was under full control. But Vadim Denisenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said on Thursday that the battle for the seaport “is still going on today”.
Mariupol is a key goal in Moscow’s efforts to secure a land corridor between the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in Donbas and Crimea, which Russia occupied and annexed in 2014, and its takeover would allow Kremlin military planners to redistribute vital resources. far away. east.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said nine humanitarian corridors for evacuating civilians, including cars, from Mariupol, Berdyansk, Tokmak and Enerhodar had been agreed on Thursday, with others expected to open in Luhansk if Russian forces stopped firing.
Inside the suburban horror of Ukraine: “I have nothing left” – video
Russia’s withdrawal from the vicinity of Kyiv has led to the discovery of a large number of apparently killed civilians, prompting international condemnation and calls for a war crimes investigation. The Hague-based International Criminal Court, which deals with abuses of rights, told reporters that Ukraine has become a “crime scene”.
During a visit to Bucha, where officials say more than 400 civilians were killed, ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan said: “We are here because we have reasonable grounds to believe that crimes are being committed by the court’s jurisdiction. Moscow has rejected all allegations of atrocities that Putin has dismissed as “fakes.”
The Russian invasion has so far driven more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes, more than 4.6 million of whom have fled abroad. Western sanctions have sparked Russia’s worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, analysts say. More than 600 Western companies have withdrawn from the country.
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