An end to the war in Ukraine could enable Russia to carry out more hostile activity in neighbouring Finland and Europe, Finnish intelligence agency Supo said on Tuesday.
“Russian resources will be freed up for influencing elsewhere when the war in Ukraine ends,” the agency said in its 2025 national security report.
“Russia is an aggressive, expansionist state that is prepared to use all means to achieve its political goals,” Supo director Juha Martelius said in the report.
He said Russia posed “a serious threat to Finland, with no improvement in sight”.
“Finland has not yet become a focus of the intense influencing that has primarily targeted major European Union member states and countries with large Russian minorities or pro-Russia political parties,” the report said.
“As a country that borders Russia and as a state on the Baltic Sea, Finland must prepare for growth in Russian influencing,” Martelius wrote in English.
The warning came a day after US President Donald Trump announced an immediate freeze on US military aid to Ukraine.
“The end of the war in Ukraine will improve the ability of Russia to engage in hostile activity elsewhere in Europe as it pursues its political objectives by means both fair and foul,” Supo said.
It said the Western intelligence community has a “highly uniform view of the growing threat from Russia”.
Finland, which shares a 1,340-kilometre (830-mile) border with Russia, has increased its defence spending since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, bringing it to 2.41 percent of GDP.
Helsinki ended decades of military non-alignment when it joined NATO in April 2023.
The Finnish intelligence agency also noted that the use of proxies made up a growing share of hostile countries’ influencing operations.
“Sabotage operations in Europe linked to the Russian military intelligence service GRU are one example of this. By using intermediaries, Russia seeks to cover its tracks,” Supo said.
Finland has been particularly attentive to influencing and hybrid operations following damage to some of its infrastructure in the Baltic Sea since late 2024.
In one such incident, Finnish officials suspect a tanker belonging to Russia’s “shadow fleet” of intentionally dragging its anchor on the seabed in order to sever a power cable and four telecommunications cables on December 25.
