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and many many times before. Ultimately I agree with Anderrson that that it goes without saying Sweden and Finland get to decide their own internal security policy and alliances.
Finland at least has basically dismissed this out of hand as a repitition of the current albeit tenuous status quo.
From what I can tell this isn't a meaningful change from the current diplomatic circumstances: Russia wants assurances that NATO won't continue to expand eastward and NATO remains coy about its expansion as an open policy. Seems like encouraging states like Ukraine and Finland to maintain a neutral buffer states officially in exchange for guarantees that they will be unmolested by Russian aggression seems to me like a reasonable détente that costs neither side anything. Better than World War 3.
cheers,
--- the late great Donald Blake
P.S. to be clear at this point I think there are very few good clean choices for us to make. So in this late hour, after the guns are already drawn, it's a kind of no win scenario. The real diplomatic work we failed to engage with over the last decade and a half might have prevented this situation.
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Potentially reasonable, but you would need pretty ironclad agreement from Russia in particular given that Putin also appears to want to expand Russia's reach into the areas not just to protect from NATO but also to adjust borders and relationships generally more friendly to Russia.
Be it puppet regimes or what have you. Effectively making an anti-west sort of NATO in the process.
I just do not see Putin driven only by concerns about NATO either, it is for sure one of them and an important one but even some foreign Russian experts seem to see things along those lines as well.
