Johan Westerholm: Rysslands upprustning förändrar säkerhetsläget i hela Östersjön

Johan Westerholm former intelligence officer welcome Thank you Paul Jonsson the Minister of Defense spoke out today and said that there is an extensive military buildup around the entire Baltic Sea region from Russia The Runt in the Baltic Sea region of Karelia and Murmansk Both the Swedish and Finnish intelligence services have communicated about this It is clear that the current structure with brigades expresses the intention to move up to divisions That means a tripling of the current size The number of soldiers must increase from about 900 000 to about half a million Russia has clearly stated that it will increase its military presence The country is now weakened because it is engaged in and around Ukraine with nearly 650 000 to 700 000 soldiers We are aware that after a ceasefire but especially after a peace agreement Russia has the opportunity to increase its military presence in the Leningrad military district What does this mean for Sweden Naturally the number of hot springs has increased This is another reminder that tensions in our area have increased dramatically This concerns the Leningrad military district Primarily it is those who are on the front line with Poland That is Finland This is also the Norman area including northern Finland and especially northern Sweden and Northern Norway So it is naturally an enormous Russia is building up massive capacity and we must respond to it Russia now has 900 000 troops in this Russian military district We need to build this up to 1.5 million people How is Sweden meeting this challenge I detail how we meet it only the defense minister and the prime minister can answer The main thing now is to start building volume We currently have warm-season seedlings in the range of 8 000 to 10 000 It's not enough I can say During my time when I did my military service it was about summer camps for 40 000 to 50 000 It makes a huge difference And here the limiting factor in this case the bottleneck is It is actually a troop command or garrison command As we learned to be friendly keep in step make the bed and dress properly Have the right equipment in the right place shoot An approximate shot at the shooting range That is learning to handle automatic cabins in this case Basic training the first training which lasts between five weeks and three months is to produce riflemen The garrison commander and the troop commander it's a tight sector today After we switched to an active defense And now we will go back to a territorial defense In a year as you say Sweden trains 8 000 soldiers The 2030 goal is 10 000 soldiers The goal for 2035 is 12 000 soldiers per year Is this enough It's too slow I say We need higher turnover in our barracks training areas and exercise fields We need to increase the number of friendly interactions per square meter per unit of time In some way It's an Indian trick This is a quick setup The war in Ukraine has also shown that it is not just a high-tech war When we have drone technology and drones missiles of various kinds Meat grinders of various kinds Russia has the unlimited resources of personnel to deploy We are seeing that now How they have been able to gain territory Naturally at an incredible cost But the Ukrainian defense lines are vulnerable Soldiers who are still injured must be deployed Who are still undergoing rehabilitation This is a clear signal that we must increase our league production It is also about numeraries The defense minister also said that approximately 650 000 to 700 000 Russian soldiers are in Ukraine They are tied up in the war What can happen during a ceasefire with Ukraine How quickly is Russia moving Give that these alliances if there is now a peace We naturally hope for this in the interest of the Ukrainian people So it means that these units still have a combat value That is they have a fairly high combat value Give it that they are fairly intact Combat experience is expensive A fighter can tell on the battlefield whether it is a combat weapon or a combat weapon opponent Naturally after rest Rebuilding again For new material Whether there will be peace in Ukraine and how sustainable it will be now We can probably expect reorganizations of large parts of this battle-hardened unit It is overlooked that those being trained are for our local area It's not that they are staying here Maybe then one would rotate them into being in Ukraine Then all of a sudden we end up with some battalions or brigades Brigade leaders in our immediate vicinity Now people have started taking the step into the cold and organizing themselves at the next level That is to say divisions that are the next step We are talking about the poor In Sweden we have developed distributions instead It's tens of thousands of soldiers we are talking about This is an incredibly serious development of course In Sweden there is a lot of focus on the Baltic Sea region We have Swedish troops in Latvia But we also have a responsibility for a base in Finland Murmansk is a major strategic base The Arctic is of great strategic importance What would this modernization mean for Sweden in the Arctic Tension is increasing Our presence is required in an entirely different way There is a set of rules called IKF The struggle for war peace and neutrality That doesn't really apply anymore Now we are under NATO command We need to be prepared to respond Only with an hour's response time Sometimes immediately respond to aggressions of any kind It is clear that we will have an increased readiness We are about to enter a very dark period We are forced to live with a heightened state of readiness in these areas We have a very rapid modernization in Sweden We have a very rapid increase in defense spending What does the current government need to do And what does the incoming government need to do to handle this There can be no doubt about the Swedish will to defend itself Here it is important There is now a good cooperation between the government and the opposition But here I would call upon the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition Magdalena Andersson To appear at joint press conferences And say that this is our will No matter how you choose for September 2026 This is our direction There will be no difference For either our allies or our imagined ideological opponents That is Russia So no matter what happens in the Swedish election So nothing will change Show the national truth