Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said that bolstering his country’s defense near Russia’s borders is one of Sweden’s core priorities to discuss with NATO after joining the military alliance last week.
A historically neutral country, Sweden became the 32nd member of NATO on Thursday, growing the Western bloc amid fears that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine could spill into eastern Europe next. The addition of Stockholm’s military, alongside Finland’s accession to the alliance in the spring, boosts NATO’s security of northern Europe and the Arctic.
Sweden also grants the alliance access to Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea that sits close to the border of the Russian exclave, Kaliningrad. According to Kristersson, who recently spoke with Financial Times, securing Gotland is “one obvious thing to be discussed with our new NATO allies,” adding that Sweden’s military presence on the island is relatively “small.”
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“There are quite a few things in terms of how to deploy our resources, where to focus the most,” Kristersson added. “And obviously everything to do with the Baltic Sea is such an obvious candidate. That goes in terms of presence on Gotland, but also in terms of surveillance, in terms of submarine capabilities.”
Gotland sits some 186 miles from Kaliningrad’s border, which is home to Russia’s Baltic Fleet. The island serves as a strategic hub for control of the Baltic Sea, which also borders Russia’s second largest city, Saint Petersburg.
“Gotland and Sweden being in NATO changes the entire calculus,” Latvian Foreign Minister Krisjanis Karins told Financial Times last week. “It means that the strategic control of the Baltic Sea would revert to NATO. It’s a question that Russia understands very well.”
Newsweek reached out to Sweden’s Foreign Ministry via email for comment on Wednesday.
NATO has been taking steps to increase security measures along its eastern borders in recent months, with particular focus on bolstering defenses in the Baltic states. Several European countries have raised concerns that Russia may look to attack the Baltics—Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia—within the next decade. Moscow has denied any intention to spark greater conflict with the Western bloc.
After the United States conducted drills with Sweden’s military on Gotland in 2022, Swedish Colonel Magnus Frykvall, commander of the Gotland regiment, told The New York Times in a phone interview that defending the island was of clear importance in light of the conflict in Ukraine.
“A lot of us thought that there wouldn’t be a need to defend Gotland after the Soviet collapse,” Frykvall told the Times in June 2022. “This has been put in a totally new point of view since the war in Ukraine in 2014, and it was even more clear to us with the current invasion.”
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.