“Finns no threat but the US foothold in North.” Putin and Finland’s NATO accession in 2022–2023

This article delves into one of Russia’s biggest strategic losses ensuing the war in Ukraine, that is, Finland’s NATO membership. Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, Finland applied for the alliance. The culmination was the country’s accession on 4 April 2023. In this article, I differentiate the stratagems which the Russian president Vladimir Putin utilises to negotiate and mitigate the outcome. To explore the language of the Russian president throughout 2022 and 2023, I apply four legitimization strategies, defined by Van Leeuwen (2007). These are authorisation, rationalisation, moral evaluation, and mythopoesis (storytelling). The Russian language material was retrieved from the website of the President of Russia, obtained with the voice “Finland.” During 2022–2023, Putin for fourteen times either named or referred to Finland. Four–five results proved lengthier utterances and substantially provided for a decent material. These added up to more than a half of the corpus. Here, Putin tackled not only the Nordic NATO bids but the wider political pattern in the Arctic as well. He utilised all four strategies, but mostly authorisation. It is not Finland or Sweden’s NATO membership to endanger Russia—but the projected American military in the North. Through storytelling and references to the future, Putin legitimises Moscow’s counteractions. The Baltic Sea as NATO’s internal water, and Russia’s major nuclear assets in Far North withstanding, Russia multiplies its troops east of Finland. Prevalently by appealing to the mutually profitable past, Putin tends to impede Finland’s imminent defence cooperation with the United States. The ordinary Finns are innocent; rather, they were insnared in NATO.