Vladimir Putin eventually might win the battle. But he is losing the war. The point of Putin’s war? To prevent any further expansion of America’s military alliance with 28 European nations and Canada, the NATO treaty, he claimed. If so, his relentless use of violence and intimidation is backfiring.

A week of indiscriminate Russian killing has achieved what decades, even centuries, of European history could not. Public opinion in Finland and Sweden, countries that have been prepared to take their chances with Russia for centuries, has transformed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is pushing European nations towards NATO.Credit:AP

For the first time, opinion in the two militarily non-aligned nations has moved emphatically in favour of joining NATO. Sweden’s former prime minister Carl Bildt remarked: “The unthinkable might start to become thinkable.”

The Atlantic Council’s Anna Wieslander, formerly an official in Sweden’s Defence Ministry, observes: “Clearly, Russia’s unprovoked war is pushing the two countries closer to NATO membership than ever before.”

When the Russian invasion itself stirred debate on the question among anxious Finns and Swedes, Putin, apparently capable of only one mode, responded with yet more intimidation. Moscow warned them against any thoughts of joining the Western alliance.

Four Russian Air Force fighters intruded into Sweden’s airspace to drive home the threat, with Swedish jets scrambling to ward them off. “Completely unacceptable” came the response from Stockholm.

Says Wieslander: “Moscow’s recent, aggressive threats that joining NATO would bring ‘military and political consequences’ upon Finland and Sweden seem to have had the opposite effect on the public. Rather than hiding in the ditches, Finns and Swedes are turning to the alliance for security.”

In Finland, 53 per cent of people now favour joining NATO, about double the level of previous years, and only 28 per cent are opposed, according to a February 23-25 poll commissioned by broadcaster YLE.

“We’ve had a situation in the past 25-30 years where Finns’ opinions on NATO have been very stable,” Matti Pesu of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs told the AP newswire. “It seems now to have changed completely.”

People fleeing the town of Irpin, Ukraine, on Sunday.Credit:Oleksandr Ratushniak /AP

In Sweden, 51 per cent of people now favour NATO membership, up from 42 per cent in January. Those opposed number 27 per cent, according to a poll on Friday by Demoksop for Aftonbladet newspaper.

The Sweden Democrats party, long opposed to joining NATO and with enough parliamentary heft to be a potential swing factor, said it’s reconsidering: “It is clear that everything is put in a completely different light right now,” a party spokesperson said.

Would NATO accept the two? We don’t know, but NATO’s Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, ventured: “I think it is possible to make a decision quickly and for them to join quickly.”

Congratulations, Vlad. Only you could have achieved this.

He should have learnt. In 2014, his resort to violence backfired when he first sent his troops into Ukraine to seize Crimea and occupy eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region.

Until that point, the Ukrainian people were uninterested in joining the Western alliance. For example, polling in 2012 showed only 28 per cent support for the idea.

But the moment that Russian forces attacked, Ukrainian opinion reacted. Not with fearful capitulation. Ukrainians did what Putin has not. They learnt from experience. They saw the Russian threat and sought protection. In 2014, for the first time, a majority of Ukrainians said they wanted to join NATO.

The wicked West had not lured Ukrainians away from Moscow. Putin’s bellicosity had pushed them towards NATO.

By January this year, as Russian forces built up along their border, 64 per cent of Ukrainians favoured membership. Of course, it was too late to save them with the protective power of the treaty.

Ukrainian governments have been on again, off again, since one first applied to join in 2008. NATO itself has been cool on the idea. So it might never have happened.

In any case, Putin made sure it couldn’t happen – by supporting the Donbass separatist fighters. A condition of NATO entry is that a country’s borders are uncontested; so as long as Putin was contesting them, he was vetoing Ukrainian membership of the alliance. No wonder so many people in so many nations fear that his NATO argument was just a cover story for the first phase of grander Russian designs on Europe.

This helps explain the other transformative effects Putin has wrought inadvertently in Europe. In a heartbeat, Switzerland abandoned centuries of political neutrality and banking secrecy to join the EU sanctions against Russia. Germany renounced its postwar pacifism to rearm and to animate Europe with a new resolve.

Violence was critical to Putin’s rise. He has told us Putin’s Law: “Fifty years ago, the streets of Leningrad taught me one thing: If a fight’s inevitable, you must strike first.”

But what if you’re not living surrounded by vicious thugs but peaceful neighbours? What if a fight is not inevitable? What if unprovoked violence turns countries against you and joins them in a hardening alliance?

This is an adjustment Putin seems unable to make. His behaviour only makes sense if he truly believes in his quasi-mystical vision of an imperial Russian reconstruction. Or if Francis Fukuyama is correct.

“The deeper problem for him is Ukrainian democracy,” Fukuyama writes in American Purpose.

“He is heavily invested in the idea that Slavic peoples are culturally attuned to authoritarian government, and the idea that another Slavic state could successfully transition to democracy undermines his own claims for ruling Russia. Ukraine presents zero military threat to Moscow; it does, however, pose an alternative ideological model that erodes Putin’s own legitimacy.”

Whatever his real aim, Putin’s primitive murderousness is backfiring against his stated one. It is not weakening the Western alliance. It has doomed the concept of European neutrality. It’s uniting Europe, hardening its resolve and moving more Europeans than ever before to seek NATO’s protection.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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