Russia threatens to send nuclear weapons to the Baltic Sea if Finland and Sweden join NATO 

Russia has warned NATO that if Sweden and Finland joined the military alliance then the Kremlin would have to bolster its nuclear defences in the Baltic.

‘There can be no more talk of any nuclear-free status for the Baltic – the balance must be restored,’ said Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council.

‘Until today, Russia has not taken such measures and was not going to,’ Medvedev said.

The threat comes after Sweden and Finland edged closer to NATO membership yesterday, and their application bids could be submitted in weeks.

Sweden’s prime minister Magdalena Andersson is understood to be eager for the country to join the trans-Atlantic alliance by June, to the fury of Vladimir Putin who invaded Ukraine in part for its desire to join to the pact.

Finland, along with neighbouring Sweden, has historically avoided NATO membership, despite close alignment with the West, in an effort not to provoke Russia. 

But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has decisively changed public opinion in the Scandinavian countries after Russia began the war with a barrage of rhetoric about stopping NATO expansion.  

The Swedish application is expected to be submitted by the NATO meeting in Madrid on June 29-20, Swedish reports say.

Similarly, Finland is hoping to start its application process ‘within weeks, not within months’, its prime minister Sanna Marin said today. This comes despite Moscow lawmaker Vladimir Dzhabarov having recently warned it would mean ‘the destruction of the country’.

After the threat, Lithuanian Defence Minister Arvydas Anusauskas said Russia already has nuclear weapons in the Baltic it does not publicly acknowledge. 

Anusauskas told Lithuania’s BNS wire that nuclear weapons have been deployed in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea since before the current crisis.

‘The current Russian threats look quite strange, when we know that, even without the present security situation, they keep the weapon 100 km from Lithuania’s border.

‘Nuclear weapons have always been kept in Kaliningrad … the international community, the countries in the region, are perfectly aware of this … They use it as a threat.’

Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, on the shore of the Baltic Sea, is sandwiched between NATO members Lithuania and Poland.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte on Thursday said the Russian threat to increase military, including nuclear, in the Baltic region was ‘nothing new’.