Belfast: Citing Russian threats and Europe’s changing security environment, Finland announced that it plans on increasing defence spending to a minimum of 3 percent GDP in the next four years and that government preparations are underway to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention, which is focused on the prohibition of anti-personnel mines.
Finland’s Ministerial Committee on Economic Policy approved the 3 percent GDP target after it was proposed by Defence Minister Antti Häkkänen, the Finnish government said in a statement.
Häkkänen added that the uplift in spending “will strengthen Finland’s defence even further” and pledged to “launch the modernisation of the Army and the strengthening of other defence capabilities based on a threat-informed basis.”
The new funding decision lets Finland “answer to the current security situation in Europe and the military threat posed by Russia,” according to Häkkänen. He shared that Finnish Defence Forces will receive “additional funding” amounting to €3.7 billion ($4 billion) out to 2029.
Helsinki said that “Russia’s development of its military capabilities and its political aspirations pose a long-term security threat to Europe and to Finland.”
By way of response, it “must sustain its capability to counter broad-spectrum influencing, resist long-term military pressure and fight large-scale wars that drag on for years, using national resources and as part of NATO,” added the statement.
What we are “seeing now is a more naked, aggressive and authoritarian Russian leadership [compared to decades past] and as many Baltic and Eastern European countries have stated, while they currently are preoccupied in Ukraine, things could change quite quickly,” Robin Häggblom, a Finnish defence expert said. “There is a worry [including in Finland] that Russia turning … to a wartime economy means that they will have problems going back to some kind of peaceful coexistence, even if somehow the Ukraine situation magically was resolved.”
