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| Europe | |
| Sweden's darkest hour: Tens of thousands are signing up to defend against a full-scale Russian attack. Nuclear bunkers are selling out. DAVID JONES's extraordinary report from Nato's new front line... | |
| 2024-03-16 | |
As they wrestle with their unfamiliar Glock 17 handguns, there is much fumbling and under-the-breath cursing. Few shots hit the basin-shaped helmets of the cardboard soldiers at whom they are aiming – an imaginary Russian invasion force presumed to have crossed the narrow Baltic strait from Finland and stormed Sweden’s south-east coast. A fortnight from now, however, Lieutenant Hakan Adolfsson, one of the officers overseeing the training of these 22 new recruits, at a pine-forested former Cold War army camp in the coastal town of Vaddo, is confident they will be ready for the battlefield. ‘Well, at least in a way that doesn’t make them a safety liability - to themselves or others,’ he smiles wryly. However, if old-fashioned qualities such as patriotism, honour and a determination to defend one’s nation from tyranny are any yardstick, these rookies, whose drills I observed on Thursday, will one day make the Swedish military proud. They are among an extraordinary number of citizens now clamouring to join the Home Guard, as Sweden - newly enrolled into Nato this week - prepares for a scenario deemed unthinkable after the Cold War ended: a full-scale Russian attack. The military enrolment rush began in 2022, after Putin’s full invasion of Ukraine, when 29,000 Swedes applied to join up – more than six times the usual number. Numbers continue to rise exponentially. In the first two months of this year, 3,000 more applications flooded in, double the normal amount. Indeed, such is the desire of ordinary Swedes to do their bit that the Home Guard has been forced to take on extra administrative staff to handle the logjam of applications. Compare this with the dire situation in Britain, where the strength of both the reserve and regular armies is falling, largely because of public apathy and underfunding. Britain’s need for security is hardly less pressing than that of the Swedes – as Defence Secretary Grant Shapps pointed out this week when backing calls led by the Mail for military spending to be increased from 2.27 to 3 per cent of GDP. However, the zeitgeist in Sweden, where blue and yellow national flags are waved with gusto again and nationalism is no longer a dirty word, is far removed from that in Britain. Like Shapps, who warns that the UK is moving perilously from a ‘post-war to pre-war’ state, Stockholm’s top politicians and defence chiefs are spelling out the threat Putin poses in the starkest terms. At a recent security conference, Michael Byden, supreme commander of Sweden’s armed forces, urged the nation’s ten million citizens to ‘mentally prepare for the fact that a war could happen in Sweden’. ‘Everyone needs to understand how serious the situation really is,’ he said. ‘If it happens here, do I have things in the right place? What should I do? The more citizens who have thought about it, and prepared, the stronger our society is.’ Yet our two nations are responding to these doom-laden messages in diametrically opposing ways. Though more than three million Britons under 25 are out of work, the very mention of reintroducing national service to increase the Army’s strength from just 75,000 to 125,000 (the minimum number of troops we need to maintain security, according to military experts) invokes howls of outrage. Witness the paroxysms of anger recently aimed towards Army chief General Sir Patrick Sanders when he dared to suggest that we should recruit a big, well-trained ‘citizen army’ (he stopped short of calling for a return to conscription). By long-standing tradition, Sweden already operates a system of ‘total civil defence’. This holds everyone between the ages of 16 and 70 jointly responsible for protecting the country when its way of life is under threat. At times of war or heightened readiness, local authorities, private companies, individuals and even religious groups can be called up to maintain essential services, such as medical and food provision and care for children and the elderly. This is now swinging into action. Meanwhile, moves to restore the former strength of the army reserve – which could have quickly mobilised 900,000 fighters to meet any attack from the old Soviet Union – are well under way. Sweden’s regular army will also be boosted by increasing its contingent of conscripts, who already account for ten per cent of its military personnel - although judging by the prevailing mood, there will be no need to force many Swedes to serve their country. For in their darkest hour for almost half a century, the public here are rising gallantly and nobly – man and woman, young and old, regardless of class or ethnicity - to the vengeful and expansionist enemy looming on their eastern flank. Their sense of sacrifice was epitomised by Lina Sighurdh, 24, one of the Home Guard recruits I met. ‘To start with, I am very thankful and grateful to be a Swedish citizen,’ replied the master’s degree student (who is rather handily studying Russian) when I asked her why she had enlisted. Swelling with pride in her newly issued uniform, she added: ‘I feel joining the Home Guard and helping the national defence is a way to uphold our liberal values in the face of extremism.’ Her remarks might almost have been scripted, but they weren’t. Other recruits offered similarly heartfelt reasons for leaving comfortable homes and jobs to undertake the tough, 12 hours-a-day course, which aims to teach them the skills of forest warfare – the type of conflict that might ensue should Russian troops invade. ‘Sweden is usually neutral, so I don’t think we are going to start a war,’ said Rebecca Minarik, 22, who works in a Stockholm carpentry store. ‘But I feel we may have to defend ourselves. Some countries want to expand.’ Could she envisage one of these countries invading Sweden? ‘Absolutely! And if the Russians come, I’m ready to fight them.’ Listening to these young Swedes pledging to spill blood for their country was almost surreal at times. Has this pacifist country, famous for its laidback way of life, totally re-invented itself? It would seem so. Where now, one wondered, were the placard-waving peaceniks who once took to Stockholm’s streets with their ban-the-bomb slogans and anti-American slogans? In less troubled times, Swedish army officers would never have specified the nationality of the soldiers engraved on those shooting targets, for fear of heightening tension. Now, though, the Swedes are done with all that mealy-mouthed appeasement. With the enemy at the door, there is no use in pretending any more. As prime minister Ulf Kristersson said this week, his country’s admission to Nato – formalised in a flag-raising ceremony in Washington, last Monday, and cemented as Swedish troops were dispatched to the Arctic Circle to take part in the alliance’s biggest joint exercise, Operation Steadfast Defender, since the fall of communism – has, at a pen stroke, ‘ended 200 years of neutrality’. So, when I asked Lieutenant Adolfsson who his new charges were supposed to be firing at, he gave a frank reply. ‘Well, they are carrying Kalashnikovs (the weapon of choice for the Russian army) so you can make up your own mind,’ he smiled mirthlessly. Then he added: ‘It may not be [politically] correct to say they are Russians, but it’s the truth. The enemies we have today are Russia, but also China, North Korea, Iran and Belarus. ‘When I speak to these new recruits, the threat from Russia often comes up. They will ask me if the Russians are coming here, and if they do, what is the scariest prospect, and I can’t just pretend everything is fine. I have to answer them honestly.’ Related: Home Guard: 2019-05-16 Sweden seeks largest mass mobilization of forces to deal with ‘Russian threat’ Home Guard: 2017-07-11 Miscellaneous Norwegian Defense Chief in classified report: The Armed Forces can not defend the country Home Guard: 2017-01-17 Hundreds of U.S. Marines land in Norway, irking Russia | |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #10 Relax, Sven. They're not invaders. Just undocumented migrants. |
| Posted by: Regular joe 2024-03-16 18:20 |
| #9 hovering nervously beside holstered pistols, a band of rookie soldiers Eh??? |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2024-03-16 11:04 |
| #8 Crouched ready for action, their chilblained hands hovering nervously beside holstered pistols, a band of rookie soldiers face down an enemy platoon, awaiting the order to fire Gah go write for Hollywood already. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2024-03-16 10:11 |
| #7 I'd have been more concerned about Finland and the Baltic states, but the Swedes have a way of "being the center" of everything. They're kinda like the French that way. |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2024-03-16 08:58 |
| #6 ^😃 |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2024-03-16 08:11 |
| #5 ..I take that you mean 'figuratively'. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2024-03-16 07:20 |
| #4 #2 Wrong order: first you gotta have balls - then you can be trained as a soldier. |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2024-03-16 04:36 |
| #3 Local levies. |
| Posted by: badanov 2024-03-16 04:24 |
| #2 War skill can be turned inwqrd as well as outward, Grom. And being willing is the first step. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2024-03-16 04:20 |
| #1 If I were Swedish (thank you Lord for not making me one), I'd worry about Malmo - not Moscow. |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2024-03-16 04:02 |
