Never seen anything like this happen with any other conflict
The only time I remember something like this was after the Charlie Hebdo offices got attacked in Paris. Absolutely everyone was going out of their way to show sympathy for France.
The perfect storm of the victims being white, generations of cultural depictions of Russians as villains, hunger for something else than covid to care about and rage about the Russian upstarts not knowing their place and thinking they can behave like Americans.
More are for NATO membership than against it for the first time ever in Sweden, I assume there is a similar trend in Finland.
I guess Finland and Sweden joining NATO is less harmful than Ukraine from a Russian perspective as there's already the Baltic states, but still.
I guess Finland and Sweden joining NATO is less harmful than Ukraine from a Russian perspective
I sure hope it doesn't piss off the Russians :scared:
The chances of joining seem pretty low in Sweden, but I'm not sure about Finland.
Not sure how it would play out, but I assume that the Russian government considered the chance that going into Ukraine would push Sweden and Finland towards NATO and that was considered an acceptable sacrifice. Both Sweden and Finland are EU members and I think things would escalate very dramatically if there was any invasion.
Finland and Sweden already have a mutual defense pact so neither would join NATO without the other. I think they both probably will, maybe after Kiev falls or some larger offensive is launched. I think Russia really miscalculated here on just how much the world would care about their invasion, I guess when you spend too much time in Syria you just get the impression that people don't really care about wars all that much anymore. It doesn't really change Russia's security situation though, they never had that much influence in Finland compared to the west and it's not like NATO just needs Finland to finally invade.
