Putin miscalculated on Finland’s border

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO.

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently threatened to station troops near the country’s border with Finland once again. That’s heavy saber-rattling, considering the border is more than 1,300 kilometers long. And Finland, of course, now enjoys the protection of its NATO allies, which means Putin’s threat is unlikely to cause any existential anxieties.

But this intimidation attempt will be unsuccessful for another crucial reason too: Russia doesn’t have enough soldiers.

“We generally had ideal relations with Finland. Simply perfect. We did not have a single claim against each other, especially territorial, not to mention other areas. We didn’t even have troops; we removed all the troops from there, from the Russian-Finnish border,” Putin complained in an interview with the RIA state news agency last month. Even so, Finland joined NATO. “That’s what they decided. But we didn’t have troops there, now we will,” he added.

Putin’s complaint was much like that of a bully or abusive partner claiming everything was fine until the other person went to the police or moved out. Indeed, one wonders whether the Kremlin’s top occupants have ever considered the effect their words and actions have on other countries, as it was, of course, Russia’s belligerence that prompted Finland to apply for NATO membership.

But the problem with constantly menacing others is that it requires considerable resources. If Russia wants to intimidate Finland by announcing it’ll avenge the country’s NATO accession with troops on the border, it needs to have plenty of troops at its disposal. And Russia simply doesn’t.

“The Russians won’t have the resources to build infrastructure, produce new heavy weaponry and recruit considerable numbers of forces to our border before the 2030s,” retired Major General Pekka Toveri, a former chief of Finnish military intelligence and recently elected member of the Finnish parliament, told me.

“Finland is a very demanding operational environment, as the Soviets learned during World War II. The Soviets called it ‘operations in swamp-forest area,’ and it does require special training and equipment that they don’t have.” Indeed, most of Finland’s border area is complete wilderness, which isn’t suitable for modern mechanized combat.

Meanwhile, so stretched is the Russian military that just months after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin had already transferred its troops stationed near the Finnish border to duty in Ukraine — even though Putin claims they were removed as a sign of friendship with Finland.

“They still have the 138th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade in Kamenka [near St. Petersburg], around 50 kilometers from the Finnish border,” Toveri noted. “But the garrison is pretty empty, with no combat-ready troops because they’re all in Ukraine. And all the five brigades close to us were half-strength already before the war.” And though Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made belligerent noises when Finland joined NATO, no troops were redeployed to the Finnish border.

Such is the Russian armed forces’ over-extension, it’s hardly surprising Finnish leaders have reacted calmly to Putin’s announcement.

Indeed, the Russian armed forces have struggled so badly to recruit enough soldiers for the war that they’ve had to hand over some areas to the paramilitary Wagner Group’s mercenaries — not to mention recruit prison inmates. Some 100,000 convicts have already been recruited for war duty in exchange for freedom, and because these poorly trained soldiers are killed in large numbers, they have to be constantly replenished. (The ex-prisoners are also notorious for marauding and pillaging.) So it came as no surprise when, a few months into its “special military operation,” Russia was also forced to execute a partial mobilization, which was only partially successful, since many eligible men had already left the country.

And now, Putin — who said late last year that Russia had 617,000 soldiers in Ukraine — wants to further grow the country’s armed forces. But it’s hard to sustain a force of 600,000 in Ukraine when the total size of Russia’s armed forces is 1.15 million. Perhaps unsurprisingly, last December Putin ordered the armed forces to grow to some 1.32 million; around the same time, Shoigu suggested they should grow to 1.5 million by 2026.

This, however, still raises the question of where these soldiers will come from, and how good they will be. It’s hardly surprising that — Wagner and ex-convicts notwithstanding — rumors of the Kremlin planning another round of mobilization have begun circulating.

As the Russian armed forces struggle with the most basic of tasks, Finnish politicians can afford to not be alarmed by Putin’s threats — for now. But the risk of Russian aggression will remain because Russia seems unlikely to fundamentally change in the near future. An adversary’s military recruitment problems are simply good luck, and our luck won’t last. That’s why Finland and Sweden were wise to join NATO.

But this time, Putin overplayed the mighty Russian military’s strength, and underestimated the ability of Western politicians to understand basic arithmetic.