This “crisis of disbelief”, as Michta put it, is not evenly spread. The further east you go, the closer you get to the Russian border, the more alert a nation’s people are to the threat, and the more psychologically prepared.
Sweden hasn’t had a war in 200 years. It has pursued a policy of neutrality for centuries. But after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it abandoned that and has made itself, in a very short space of time, one of the most psychologically prepared countries in Europe.
“Russia is self-evidently dangerous”, Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Christersson told The Economist magazine last month.
“We don’t know when it [the war in Ukraine] ends, but how it ends will define the security situation in our part of the world for at least a generation”
Sweden has a system of partial conscription, in which all school leavers must register for military service. The armed forces pick – and conscript – the best candidates. The conscripts then do up to 15 months compulsory training before going back into civilian life, in employment or higher education. At the same time, they become part of their country’s large reserve force.
“There’s a lot of citizen engagement,” says Minna Alander, an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies think tank. “It was almost an internet joke in 2022 and 2023 that everybody wished for a call up. Sometimes people get frustrated if they haven’t been called up for a long time. It’s an expectation for sure.
“Sweden has, for example, been identifying civil engineers with some relevant skills in, say, electricity supply who could be exercised in case of disruption. So Sweden can access this pool of civil engineers [who know] what they could do and how they could be activated.”
When Christersson was asked whether Russia should be seen as a potential aggressor even after the war in Ukraine is over he said, “Yes. We have a few hundred years experience of this… We know Russia pretty well.”
The three Baltic Republics – Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia – also know Russia pretty well. They only regained their independence from Moscow in the 1990s. German troops invaded Lithuania in the 1940s and are now back on Lithuanian soil, this time by invitation, to bolster that country’s defences against the threat from the east. A thousand British troops lead a multi-national force in Estonia for the same reason.
