Finnish News Recap, week 10: Sanna in Ukraine Edition

I have occasionally, in a variety of formats, tried to summarize weekly Finnish news in English. This is mostly for my own interest and edification (ie. forces me to keep track of normal news events, not just my personal greatly varying topics of interest). I will endeavor to provide such news recaps on this blog, as well.

SANNA MARIN IN UKRAINE: Prime Minister Sanna Marin, invited by the Ukrainian president Zelenskyy and accompanied by Environmental Minister / Greens leader Maria Ohisalo, visited Ukraine. It being election time, some have basically interpreted the entire trip to be electioneering, but visiting other countries is generally a perfectly acceptable activity for a PM and global politics hardly stop for Finnish elections.

Two particular things about this trip gained some attention. Firstly, Marin, alongside Zelenskyy and many others, paid respect to a Dmytro Kotsjubailo, a fallen Ukrainian soldier and an activist in the far-right Right Sector movement. A number of various critics of the Western and Finnish Ukraine policy critics seized on this to talk about the lack of care in the Western about far-right influence in the Ukrainian military generally.

Still, this hasn’t been risen to become a major topic of discussion, locally. The cause of Ukraine continues to enjoy widespread support in Finland, and that support is not predicated on the specific interests of whatever fallen Ukrainian soldiers the Ukrainian state chooses to honor. If the alternative is just ending support for Ukraine, well… that’s not an option a clear majority of Finns are going to go for.

FIGHTERS: More waves were caused by Marin’s comments to a Finnish reporter’s question on whether Finland has considered giving Ukraine it’s old F-18 Hornet aircraft, which is getting retired due to Finland’s purchase of the more advanced F-35 fighters, to Ukraine as military aid. Marin essentially stated that while Finland operates as a part of a coalition, this could be considered, at some point.

While Marin’s answer was very noncommittal, it still contained enough to be interpreted by Ukrainians as some sort of a promise of delivering fighters (and the following clarification as an U-turn), which then led in short order to various Finnish military experts saying that no, this isn’t really possible for various reasons, such as them being at the end of their use cycle when finally decommissioned, which is years from now. The president and the Defense Minister also quickly intervened to note that there have been no discussions of this sort and they haven’t been consulted.

Naturally, Marin has spent a lot of time clarifying that, indeed, her noncommittal answer was intended to be noncommittal, but there’s degrees to even being noncommittal. Something like this was pretty much guaranteed to open up easy avenues of attack by portraying the PM as someone willing to shoot off the hip on important security questions to get media attention and support-Ukraine brownie points.

GENERAL NATO PROCESS: President Sauli Niinistö got far less criticism when visiting the White House to meet with Joe Biden, but this trip didn’t include anything particularly prone to making waves. Biden simply repeated that US is committed to Finland’s NATO process, which is of course something we already know.

Finland’s long and winding NATO process is a perennial topic of interest for the press, and stories about the process featured in last week’s media, as well, beyond Niinistö’s visit. While Turkey has been the more general headache for the Finnish NATO wishes (and this shows no signs of abating soon), Hungary has also featured as a problem, and a Hungarian delegation has now been touring Finland in some sort of a fact-finding tour related to previous Finnish criticisms of Orban’s govt on the rule-of-law stuff, giving a positive signal, though the signals from the Hungarian government appear to vary weekly, depending on what Orban considers advantageous at whatever moment.

IN OTHER NEWS, there’s an election campaign going on, with a related assortment of small-scale squabbles too minor to mention here. Regarding the election, Centre Party, the rightmost party in the current center-left government, announced they do not wish to repeat this specific government constellation due to it having too many green/left parties, but left the door open for other potential governmental constellations.

A minor topic for some time has been accusations that Mika Lintilä, the Minister of Economic Affairs, may have been drinking on the job and ordering alcohol on the state budget, but this particular topic is starting to peter out. There was a spate of violent youth attacks in schools, contributing to a discussion on street crime and youth crime that has been a strong topic of debate throughout the election period, though more on this next week.