Finland witnesses withdrawal of investors & businesses over risk escalation with Russia

As Finland declared its bid to join NATO defensive Alliance despite the warnings from Russia, foreign investors have scrambled to pull out of the country as it shares 1,300-kilometre-long border with Moscow. Owing to the risk assessment due to Finland’s close proximity with Russia, investors and businesses are diverting to the neutral Baltic States over the question of safety and stability of the operations. With Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, the Nordic countries have scrambled to step up the security. The major withdrawal of businesses comes as Finland’s president warned that applying for NATO membership would come with a “major risk” of escalation with Moscow.

Finland's NATO membership aligns with its political motivation: Finnish leader

Applying for the membership falls in line with Finland’s current political stance to align with the EU, Sauli Niinisto, Finland’s president, reportedly stated. He also iterated the need for defence co-operation with the US and neighbouring Sweden in the face of Russian aggression.“The starting point is that we are looking at something else than continuing just like this,” Niinisto had told the FT. “All these alternatives have an advantage that our security will improve. Or we make sure that our stability remains and that we can make sure we live in [a] secure environment . . . Our main headline is: Finnish security,” he went on to add. 

Russia had threatened Sweden and Finland against joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) citing that such a move would jeopardise political stability in the northern European region. "It is clear why the alliance needs this. The goal is to continue building up military potential and geographical expansion and to create another flank to threaten Russia. But it is not clear why our Finnish and Swedish neighbours in the Baltic region would turn into a new frontier of NATO's confrontation with Russia,” Russia’s ministry of foreign affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a state presser.

Moscow has been warning that the two neutral Nordic countries seeking membership in the military bloc will lead to "massive strategic blunder". Recently Russia also threatened the two neutral nations of nukes and doubling the concentration of its troops in a major escalation in and around the Baltic Sea region if Finland and Sweden joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “In this case, there can be no talk of non-nuclear status for the Baltic,” Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chief of Russia’s Security Council and former president, said in a Telegram post asserted.