The legacy of the NATO summit. What are the Kremlin strategists particularly concerned about?

Paragraph 7 of the Washington Summit Declaration expresses the commitment to fully utilize the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO and the additional capabilities it brings to the Alliance, integrating them into NATO plans, forces and command structures, including ensuring NATO presence in Finland. This is a very unpleasant signal for Russia, which is determined by geography and the peculiarities of the development of transport infrastructure in the north of Russia. Even now, if necessary, Finnish ground forces can effectively control the Kola Peninsula, which is militarized “to the limit”, has strong combat aviation and rocket artillery firepower, and is the main base of the Russian Northern Fleet, connected to the “mainland”. Russia has only two main access roads: the R21/E105 highway, also known as the Kola Highway, and the railway line named after Kirov. Given that navigation in winter is restricted in Russian territorial waters in the Barents Sea north of the Northern Fleet headquarters in Severomorsk due to the thickness of ice, the above-mentioned two Kola Peninsula transport roads are the only safe supply routes to the Northern Fleet bases. Therefore, Finland’s accession to NATO fundamentally changes the priorities for the use of force in the event of a regional conflict. At that time, Russia will have to consider not penetrating deep into the adversary’s territory, but protecting its strategically important nuclear submarine bases, which will be a very difficult task.

Moreover, this factor will amplify