Sweden’s 21-month stay in NATO’s waiting room came to an end this week with long-awaited ratification of its May 2022 membership application by the Hungarian parliament.
Stockholm’s accession completes NATO’s expansion to 32 members, a growth prompted by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and met with repeated threats from President Vladimir Putin and his top officials.
Membership for Sweden and neighboring Finland—which joined in April 2023—has transformed NATO’s security environment in northern Europe and the Arctic, adding 830 miles of frontier with Russia and drawing a NATO noose around the Baltic Sea, already referred to by some officials as a “NATO lake.”
