During a NATO exercise, the question of a military rapprochement between Nordic countries

Within a few days (and decades), the vision of the soldiers must have been the same, the icy roads, the flurries of snow, the sun sometimes on the crushing mountains, the leafless dwarf birches and the fir trees which left greenish touches, houses scattered along endless fjords, battered by Arctic and North Atlantic winds.

The NATO exercise “Cold Response 2022”, which ends in Norway on 1er April and brought together 30,000 soldiers of twenty-seven nationalities, took place on the very site of the Battle of Narvik, which took place over sixty-two days, starting on April 9, 1940. Epic battle which notably saw the Foreign Legion and the French mountain hunters join Norwegian, Polish and British troops, and initially repel German aggression. First victory of the war against the Nazis, which was however short-lived.

At the dawn of the invasion, Norway had nevertheless made the choice of neutrality, as during the First World War. In the aftermath of the war, after five years of occupation, she will no longer ask herself the question of this neutrality quickly flouted by the Nazis. It will be one of the founding members of NATO, in 1949, and was for a long time the only country of the Western military alliance to share a border with the USSR. At his side, in recent weeks, while the war is raging in Ukraine following the Russian invasion on February 24, it is the Swedish and Finnish troops who find themselves in an in-between.

“political issue”

Sweden and Finland, with which Norway shares a border, no longer really displayed neutrality during the Cold War, after joining the European Union in 1995, and no longer really freedom of alliance since they joined, in 1994, the Partnership for Peace, a bilateral cooperation program with NATO. Since 2006, they have participated in particular in “Cold Response” manoeuvres.

According to the scenario of the 2022 exercise, the Scandinavian kingdom suffered an attack and activated Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which provides for mutual assistance from NATO member states in the event of aggression. The Finns are at the side of the Swedes and the Norwegians to secure the Norwegian coast against this attack arriving by sea. French elements of the 9and marine infantry brigade are taking part in the operation. On a mountain inland, the Finnish lieutenant Ville Heikkilä commands three Tampella 155 K 83 guns and thirty-five soldiers, thirty-two of whom are conscripts.

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