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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

How many NATO countries has Russia attacked in the history of NATO? How many non-NATO countries? Moreover, Finland’s military and diplomatic bureaucracy was already well-integrated into NATO, so there isn’t a _lot_ of additional organization (at least as far as these things go).

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During the time period that NATO existed, the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Expanding back a few years before the creation of NATO (which I'd argue is a reasonable allowance because a a defensive pact it was formed directly in response to some of these events), you can also include the invasions of Poland and the Baltic states

To be clear, you're emphasizing my point. None of those countries invaded by the USSR were admitted to NATO at the time, and no country has ever been invaded by Russia (or anyone else) while being part of NATO.

>How many NATO countries has Russia attacked in the history of NATO? How many non-NATO countries?

How many countries has America/NATO attacked in the history of NATO?

> America/NATO

They are not the same.

The list of Nato operations can be found here[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NATO_operations

You missed my point pretty spectacularly there, friend. :)

These questions are irrelevant. The tactical significance of Finland to Russia is small compared to the resources required to invade it as is. Due to bad cost/benefit ratio it is therefore unlikely for Russia to attack Finland. But now that Finland is part of NATO it has to bear the cost when some other country gets attacked. It's a bad deal.

Russia literally invaded Finland last century

I don't think you can count "non-NATO" when NATO did not exist yet.

The point is that Finland matters a lot to Russia. The border with Finland is huge, geographically hard to defend, and right next to Russia's capitol. Finland's maritime zones join with existing NATO states to block Russia from operating in much of the Baltic (a process that would be completed when Sweden joins). Finland joining NATO is more than a shrug for Russia.

Moscow is nowhere close to Finland. St Petersburg is. Most of Russian border area near Finland is just forest.

Oops, fair enough—I had just been thinking of older history and forgot that the Bolsheviks moved the capitol. St. Petersburg is still the second-largest city and a major strategic location, but you're right that it's not the capitol.

Finland was also part of Russia until 1917.

Yeah, and the Finns hated it. My ancestors immigrated to the US to avoid being drafted from Finland into the imperial Russian army.

Even worse deal for Russia, which now has to think even harder about attacking NATO countries with its magnificent invincible army.

Exactly one[0] NATO country has ever been attacked and that wasn’t even in Europe but in the Falkland Islands. Being a member state is a pretty good bet on not being invaded.

[0] not counting non-nation state terrorist attacks on various members

It is also interesting to note that 9/11 resulted in the first and only time article 5 was invoked.

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