the development of russian military policy and finland

2
GEOPOLITICAL CHANGES IN EUROPE AFTER THE
END OF THE COLD WAR
T
he Cold War is generally considered to have ended with the collapse of
the Berlin wall, or at the latest with the breakup of the Soviet Union in
December of 1991. 15 Geopolitical changes in the CSCE Member States
were noteworthy. Germany was reunited, and the Soviet republics became
independent. In the case of the Baltic States it was indeed a return to independence.
The Government of Finland unilaterally declared in September of
1990 that the provisions of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947 limiting Finland’s
sovereignty had lost their meaning. At the same time President Koivisto reinterpreted
the Treaty on Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance
[FCMA], which finally disappeared into history on the fall of the Soviet Union
in December the following year. 16 Finland joined the European Union in
1995, and her security political position became perhaps more favourable than
ever before after 1917, when independence was declared.
The President of Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel chaired the Warsaw Pact
summit meeting on 1 July 1991, when that military alliance was formally terminated.
17 NATO, however, prevailed, and was assigned new tasks.
15
Lavrov, 2011. The exact timing of the end of the Cold War is diffuse. It is rather a process
that is still affected by the relations between the leading powers, because these have
returned to it repeatedly. Speaking at the 47 th Munich Security Conference on 5 February
2011, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov referred to President Dmitry Medvedev's
initiative to conclude the Euro-Atlantic Security Treaty (EST) as follows: ”[…] Essentially we
are talking here about permanent elimination of the Cold War legacy”. The United States and Russia
made a joint statement at the 2010 NPT Review Conference which said that signing of the New START
Treaty “in effect, marks the final end of the “Cold War” period”. See also United Nations, 2010.
Colonel Sergey Tretyakov, a former officer in charge of Russia’s foreign security service
SVR operations in the United States in 1995–2000, strongly denied that the Cold War was
over as late as in June 2009. See also Fox News, 2009, “KGB Defector Weighs in on
US/Russian Relations”, 7 June 2009 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh7VG3jCHQA]
and Earley, 2007, pp. 330–331.
16 Nyberg, 2007, pp. 285–299.
17
Havel, 2008, p. 294. President Havel was of the opinion that the termination of the Warsaw
Pact was the single most significant event during his term as President. Because of his
personal experiences he found the official termination ceremony to be both strange and
absurd. Completing the Soviet withdrawal was a very complicated process and the last Soviet
troops left the country only two years later.