By Anne Kauranen
HELSINKI (Reuters) – Planned Russian military reforms that would increase Moscow’s troop numbers by 30% are a threat to NATO and should be met with vigilance, the chief of Finland’s military intelligence service Pekka Turunen said on Thursday.
Finland, which shares the European Union’s longest border with Russia, joined the Western military alliance NATO in 2023 and drew its Nordic neighbour Sweden to follow in March 2024, both in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Finland’s military intelligence service led by Turunen noted in an annual review published on Thursday that Moscow has announced plans to reform its military by the end of 2026.
“Yes this is a threat to NATO, especially if the plan is executed,” Turunen told Reuters, adding he thought Russia could realistically achieve its goals by 2030. “We need to react in the sense that we need to be vigilant.”
Russia’s defence minister said in December that Moscow must be ready to fight NATO in Europe in the next decade. President Vladimir Putin, speaking at the same gathering, said Western leaders “are simply scaring their own population that we are going to attack someone there using the pretext of the mythical Russian threat”.
Turunen said Russia was targeting a 30% increase in the number of its troops, which would bring the total strength of its military to 1.5 million soldiers.
The number of Russian troops based in Finland’s vicinity could double or triple from the period before the Ukraine war, Turunen said, with a new corps to be deployed in Russia’s adjacent Karelia region and existing units to be expanded in the Kola Peninsula and around St. Petersburg.
“This will be very much affected by the situation in Ukraine, whether the war in Ukraine will end or possibly remain in some state of a frozen conflict,” he said.
(Reporting by Anne Kauranen; Editing by Peter Graff)
