Russia said Monday that the West should have no illusions that Moscow’s US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Western military alliance will simply tolerate Scandinavian expansion to include Sweden and Finland. military tension

Vladimir Putin, the supreme leader of Russia since the last day of 1999, has repeatedly cited NATO’s post-Soviet expansion east to the Russian borders as a reason for the invasion of Ukraine.

But the war ignited one of the biggest changes in Europe’s security architecture in decades: the unthinkable moves by Sweden and Finland, which share a 1,300km border with Russia, to join a military alliance.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, quoted by the state news agency RIA, “must not be under the illusion that we will simply tolerate it – and neither should Brussels, Washington and other NATO capitals.”

Ryabkov, who led the talks with the US on Russia’s proposal to stop NATO’s eastward expansion, said that Helsinki and Stockholm’s decision to join the alliance was a mistake.

“The overall level of military tension will increase, the predictability in this area will decrease. It’s a shame that common sense is sacrificed for a ghostly trend of what to do in this evolving situation,” Ryabkov said. said.

Russia said it would only be a “military-technical response”, with little hint of what to do in response to NATO’s Scandinavian expansion.

One of Putin’s closest allies said last month that Russia could deploy nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles in the Russian enclave in Kaliningrad if Finland and Sweden join NATO.

The participation of Finland and Sweden in NATO, established in 1949 to ensure European security against the Soviet Union, will be one of the greatest strategic consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to date.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said such NATO enlargement would not strengthen Europe’s security.

The West says NATO is purely defensive, an alliance of 30 countries, including former republics such as Poland and Hungary, which are part of the Soviet bloc’s Warsaw Pact military alliance, as well as nuclear powers such as the United States, Britain and France.

Moscow says NATO threatens Russia and Washington has repeatedly ignored the Kremlin’s concerns over the security of its borders in the West, which was the source of the two devastating European invasions in 1812 and 1941.