A pair of B-52 strategic bombers that came in over Finland from Norwegian air space made a first-ever flight in the skies above Lapland near the Lake Inari Sunday morning.
The two strategic bombers crossed the border into Finland from Norway’s northern region. Over Lapland, they were met by three U.S. Air Force tankers and Finnish fighter jets.
“Today, Finland has implemented cooperation with the strategic bombers of the United States in the territory of Finland,” the country’s defense minister Antti Häkkänen said on X.
“It is a normal cooperation carried out in the territory of a NATO member country and it demonstrate the basic pillar of common defense and deterrence,” Häkkänen said.
But two B-52 strategic bombers over northern Finland is far from normal. It has never happened before and shows the fundamental change in geopolitics following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
As a result of the war, Finland joined NATO in April 2023 and said there will be no geographical restrictions on where NATO-partners could cooperate within the country’s territory.
Defense analyst with the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Per Erik Solli, is not surprised.
“This development is a natural evolution in a process gradually strengthening regional and multinational deterrence,” Solli says to the Barents Observer.
Solli is a former F-16 fighter jet pilot in the Norwegian Air Force and has followed the strategic changes in both air- and naval power inside the Arctic Circle in recent years. He has published a longer OpEd in the Barents Observer about national and NATO changes seen after February 2022.
Close to the Kola Peninsula
The B-52 bombers north in Lapland is about as close to the Kola Peninsula as it is possible to get from the southwest. Saariselkä, where the plane was met by the U.S. Air Force tankers, is some 220 kilometers inside the Arctic Circle
On Sunday it was clear skies all over northernmost Finland and Russia’s northwest corner. From cockpit, the pilots could see deep into the Kola Peninsula where Russia has its ballistic missile submarines along the coast to the Barents Sea.
In distance, the crew of the B-52 could also see the Olenya airfield from where Russia’s Tu-95MS bombers use to take off when flying missions to bomb civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.
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