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Wimbledon has not banned athletes from countries since after World War II, when it barred players from Germany and Japan.

Tennis players from Russia and Belarus will not be allowed to compete at this year’s Wimbledon tournament due to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (AELTC) said.

Among the prominent players affected by the ban are reigning US Open champion Daniil Medvedev, who recently reached number one in the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) rankings; men’s number-eight-ranked Andrey Rublev; Aryna Sabalenka, who was a Wimbledon semifinalist in 2021 and is number four in the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) rankings; Victoria Azarenka, of Belarus, a former women’s number one who has won the Australian Open twice; and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, the French Open runner-up last year.

“We recognise that this is hard on the individuals affected, and it is with sadness that they will suffer for the actions of the leaders of the Russian regime,” Ian Hewitt, chairman of the AELTC, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The tennis organization had “carefully considered” alternative measures that might be taken within United Kingdom government guidance, he said.

“But given the high profile environment of The Championships the importance of not allowing sport to be used to promote the Russian regime and our broader concerns for public and player (including family) safety, we do not believe it is viable to proceed on any other basis,” Hewitt said.

Wimbledon, the most high-profile of tennis’s four Grand Slam events, runs from June 27 to July 10 this year.

Russian officials had reacted angrily to the reports of the ban, deeming it “unacceptable”.

“Once again they simply turn athletes into hostages to political prejudice, political intrigues,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“This is unacceptable. Taking into account that Russia is a very strong tennis country, our athletes are at the top of world rankings, the competition itself will suffer from their removal.”

Tennis bodies had banned Russia and Belarus from international team competitions following the February 24 invasion. Russian and Belarusian players, however, had been allowed to compete on tours but not under the name or flag of their countries.

At present, Russian and Belarusian players are still able to compete at the French Open, which starts in May.

“I think this decision is wrong but there is nothing we can change,” Russian Tennis Federation President Shamil Tarpischev told the country’s Sport Express newspaper earlier.

“The [Russian] Tennis Federation has already done everything it could,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk about this, but I will say that this decision goes against the athletes … We are working on the situation, that’s all I can say.”

Wimbledon has not banned athletes from countries since after World War II, when players from Germany and Japan were not allowed to compete.

Ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, Ukrainian tennis players Elina Svitolina and Marta Kostyuk issued statements calling for a blanket ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes from international events.

International athlete-led pressure group Global Athlete said banning players from the two countries would also “protect these athletes who have no choice to remove themselves from competitions”.

“These athletes must follow the orders from their countries’ leaders,” it added.

British Sports Minister Nigel Huddleston had said last month that he would not be comfortable with a “Russian athlete flying the Russian flag” and winning Wimbledon in London.

Kenyan police have launched a manhunt after the body of a female athlete was found with stab wounds in the town of Iten, famous for its center for long-distance runners.

Police say they are looking for the Ethiopian boyfriend of Damaris Muthee Mutua, 28, who was born in Kenya but competed for Bahrain.

She is the second female athlete to be killed in Iten in a year.

Last year, Kenyans were shocked by the killing of Olympic runner Agnes Tirop.

Her husband remains in custody and denies murder.

Police say Mutua’s body was found in “a state of decomposition” in the Rift Valley town of Iten, local police chief Tom Makori told the AFP news agency.

Mutua’s boyfriend was training at the same high-altitude center as her and may have left the country, police say.

“The suspect called a friend whom they were training together and informed him that he had killed a girlfriend and the body was in the house,” Mr Makori told the Reuters news agency.

Mutua competed for Kenya as a junior athlete but later switched to run for Bahrain.

The Ethiopian Athletics Federation has sent its condolences to Mutua’s family and friends and described her as a “heroin athlete”. For its part, Athletics Kenya paid their blessing to her family and lamented Damaris Muthee Mutua’s talent.

Annual inflation rose to 6.7 percent last month, up from 5.7 percent in February, Statistics Canada reported Wednesday.

Canadian consumer price inflation shot past expectations in March, jumping to a new three-decade high and cementing expectations the Bank of Canada will continue with aggressive interest rate hikes in coming weeks.

Annual inflation rose to 6.7% last month, up from 5.7% in February, Statistics Canada reported Wednesday in Ottawa. That’s the highest since January 1991 and exceeds the median estimate of 6.1% in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

The report shows inflation pressures that are more elevated than the central bank estimated just last week, reinforcing pressure on policymakers led by Governor Tiff Maclem to withdraw stimulus from an overheating economy. Investors see strong probability of a second half-percentage point increase at its next meeting, after officials delivered a jumbo hike last week.

“Today’s surprise on inflation substantially increases the odds that we do see another 50-basis-point hike in June,” Josh Nye, an economist at Royal Bank of Canada, said in an interview on BNN Bloomberg Television. “The market was starting to lean in that direction and I think this is only going to add to that.”

Bonds were hitting hard. The benchmark Canadian government two-year yield shot up to nearly 2.56% — the highest since October 2008 — from about 2.52% before the release. The 10-year yield moved above 2.8%.

Prices rose by 1.4% in March alone, the biggest one-month increase since the country introduced a federal sales tax in 1991.

The reading may represent the peak of the run-up in annual price gains, capturing the impact of soaring food and energy costs after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Still, the return to anything resembling normal is expected to be prolonged and that’s a for policymakers trying to prevent inflation expectations from hardening at current levels.

And while gasoline prices were the biggest contributor to the monthly and annual gain in prices, inflation has become broad-based with sharp increases in costs for housing, food and cars. The average of the central bank’s core measures — often seen as a better indicator of underlying price pressures — rose to 3.77%, also the highest since 1991.

Goods inflation hit 9.2% in March, the highest since 1982. Services inflation rose to 4.3%, the highest since 2003.

Macklem and his officials forecast inflation would slow to an average 4.5% by the fourth quarter of this year. Inflation averaged 5.8% in the first quarter, versus Bank of Canada estimates of 5.6%.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, prices jumped 0.9% in March, matching a record high. Gasoline prices were up 12% on the month, and 40% from a year earlier. Food prices were up 7.7% from a year earlier, after a 0.9% gain in March. Grocery prices were up 8.7% on an annual basis.

(Updates with market and economist reaction)

–With assistance from Erik Hertzberg.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Sweden’s government suspects that actors from abroad incited violent riots in several Swedish cities last week, according to the country’s justice minister.

Crowds threw rocks and burned cars and trash cans after a Danish far-right provocateur announced plans to hold meetings in Sweden. Rasmus Paludan has burned copies of the Quran at events in Denmark where he also bashes Islam, and the news he wanted to do the same in Sweden sparked anger.

Paludan, who holds dual Danish-Swedish citizenship, “seems for some reason to hate Sweden and try to harm Sweden. I do not understand why” Justice Minister Morgan Johansson said.

In an interview with Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published Wednesday, Johansson referred to online claims that surfaced earlier this year about Swedish social service agencies allegedly kidnapping Muslim children.

“There are many signs that they have been running here as well, campaigning and supporting this in various ways,” the minister said.

The Foreign Ministry in Stockholm posted a Twitter thread in February devoted to what it termed “a disinformation campaign.” A Swedish agency established to counter misinformation said the kidnapping claims could be traced to an Arabic-language site whose creator group.

“We see how the image of Sweden is set by some of these actors in the Middle East,” Aftonbladet quoted Johansson as saying. “It is also addressed by a couple of governments, in Iraq and in Iran.”

After word of Paludan’s planned stunt reached Iran and the United Arab Emirates, the governments in Tehran and Dubai summoned Swedish diplomats to protest.

A total of 26 police officers and 14 other individuals — protesters or other people — were injured in the riots, and 20 police vehicles destroyed or damaged, officials have said.

The latest violence broke out Sunday night in Malmo, Sweden’s third-largest city, as an angry crowd of mainly young people set fire to tires, debris and garbage cans in an neighborhood known for high crime.

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Unrest and violent clashes were reported in several other Swedish cities. Three people were hurt in Norrkoping on Sunday as they were hit by ricochets when police fired warning shots.

Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson is set to visit Norrkoping and Linkoping, another city that saw rioting, on Wednesday.

National police officials said Monday that they suspected some of the rioters were linked to criminal gangs that intentionally target police.

More than 5 million people have fled Ukraine since Russia’s February invasion of the country, according to data from the United Nations, making it one of the largest refugee crises in Europe since World War II.

Refugee totals that had begun to stabilize are surging anew as Russia pushes into the country’s west, killing civilians in Lviv, a city seen as a relatively safe place for those displaced by the war but who had not yet fled Ukraine.

“As we approach the two-month mark of the war in Ukraine, reaching 5 million refugees is a grim milestone of the toll Putin’s aggression has taken on civilians. With each day that passes, people who escape are even more vulnerable, having lived through months of conflict with no end in sight,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said in a statement to The Hill.

“Five million refugees represents 11 percent of the Ukrainian population — meaning nearly one in 8 people has now fled the country.”

More than half of fleeing Ukrainians have settled in nearby Poland. But hundreds of thousands have also landed in Romania, Hungary and Moldova, while more than a half a million Ukrainians have been pushed into Russia.

“It shows how quickly displacement can happen and is reflective, I think, of the violence against civilians by Russia,” said Sunil Varghese, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project.

The bulk of those leaving — at least 90 percent, according to the UN — are women and children, as men aged 18 to 65 have been barred from leaving Ukraine.

The refugee totals have now surpassed figures first forecasted by US intelligence agencies, which predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine could lead to anywhere from 1 million to 5 million refugees.

While the majority are expected to remain in Europe, President Biden has committed to taking in 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, a goal that would be met over many years rather than the immediate future.

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The US has also offered temporary protected status from deportation to Ukrainians already in the country — a move expected to aid 60,000 Ukrainians.

The Biden administration has also not subjected them to Title 42, which allows for quick expulsion of migrants at the US border without allowing them to seek asylum.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.

More than 12 million people, including seven million within Ukraine, have fled their homes since the Russian invasion on February 24, the UN says.

The United Nations’ refugee agency says more than five million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their country in less than two months since the Russian invasion, creating an early refugee crisis.

The Geneva-based UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Wednesday said 5.01 million Ukrainians had left the country since Russia invaded on February 24.

The figure of five million is a fresh and “staggering” milestone in Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II as the onslaught intensifies in the eastern Donbas region.

Just three weeks ago, when the number reached four million, the UNHCR had said it had exceeded the worst-case predictions.

“In less than two months … we’ve seen about a quarter of Ukraine’s population, more than 12 million people in total, including five million refugees, but also 7.1 million inside the country, have been forced to flee their homes, so this is a staggering amount of people,” UNHCR spokeswoman in Geneva, Shabia Mantoo, told The Associated Press news agency.

Having fled to neighbor countries, they are met with hospitality and encouraged to continue their active life. Half of the refugees from Ukraine are children, according to the UNHCR.

In Poland, where more than 2.8 million Ukrainians have arrived, they are given Polish ID numbers, the PESEL, which entitles them to work, access to free healthcare, schooling and bonuses for children.

Another Ramadan, another attack on Palestinian worshipers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem. In explaining the Israeli attacks, the majority of Euro-American politicians, media analysts, and commentators, exemplified in this predictably inane CBC report, are emphasizing the “high tensions” that come along with the confluence of three major religious events, and framing Israeli actions as a response to the “Palestinian terrorist attacks” in four Israeli cities.

Palestinians are accustomed to hearing these types of explanations that basically present a distorted picture of a religious conflict that is caused by political Islamist ideologies and their bigotry, intolerance, and hatred towards Jews. The Palestinian people, who are quintessentially defending their right to exist and live on the lands that they have called home for generations across centuries, are labelled by Israel and its Euro-American allies as, hateful, emotional, irrational, and backwards people who continuous causes cycles of violence.

Underneath this superstructure of fanciful Israeli and Euro-American ideologies, political sophistry, and ahistorical narratives, is the brute reality of settler-colonial conquest. The reason Israel has launched this latest attack is the same reason that it has launched so many before it and will be the reason for their coming attacks: The Israeli state is built on a foundation of settler colonial sovereignty.

Embedded at the foundation of the Israeli state, constantly animating its actions and policies, regardless of which political party or coalition is in power, is the idea that Israel, as a majority Jewish nation-state, must secure and expand supreme sovereign control over the land of historic Palestine. This is the cause and the goal of Israeli violence.

It is the cause because Israeli violence springs from the project of colonial modernity and replicates it in Palestine. Zionism was originally driven by the desire to protect European Jews from the horrors of European anti-Semitism. But as soon as this desire took the path of settler colonisation and practiced settler-colonial establishment violences in Palestine beginning in the early parts of the 20th century, the cause itself became the of settler colonial sovereignty, which is necessarily supreme in its logic and form . It is also the goal of Israeli violence because supreme sovereignty over the entire land of historic Palestine is yet to be definitively secured for Israel. Palestinian resistance still stands in its way.

Israeli violence

In my scholarly work, I have argued that it is irrelevant whether Israeli police, soldiers, settlers, or politicians believe that they are simply using violence to “contain a riot”, “establish law and order”, “protect Israeli civilians”, “ maintain the status quo of the holy sites”, and so on.

To achieve these proclaimed intentions and motivations, it is not necessary to attack a woman from behind with a police baton as she films the desecration of the Muslim holy sites; violently push and kick elderly men as if they’re cattle; arrest children and surround one lonesome child with a dozen armed Israeli police as if he is an evil supervillain; break the stained glass windows and damage centuries-old walls in Al-Aqsa Mosque; fire tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber-coated steel bullets at worshipers inside the mosque; prevent ambulances from reaching the approximately 158 injured; attack medical staff who were helping the injured inside the compound; assault a photojournalist who is documenting Israeli actions; Arrest at least 450 Palestinians and then proceed to violently assault their relatives who went to wait for them outside of Israeli jails, and the list goes on and on.

These acts of violence are not about security, law and order, or maintaining the status quo. They are revelatory of the Israeli drive to assert supreme Israeli sovereignty over Palestine and Palestinians. The message of these acts of violence is this: Israel has the final and last judgment on the life and death of Palestinians, and there are no serious consequences for Israelis and no tangible recourse for Palestinians once those judgments are decided, sometimes at a whim.

This aspiration towards supreme power is prevalent throughout Israeli politics and society and has been for some time. It was almost a year ago that Israel launched a devastating military onslaught on the Gaza Strip in the wake of similar events that are happening today: expulsions of Palestinians from their homes and the desecration of Muslim places of worship. From May 10 to May 21, 2021, an 256 Palestinians were killed, including 66 children, and nearly 2,000 Palestinians were injured, including more than 600 children, 400 women, and 1,000 men. The infrastructural damage was severe: Some 2,000 housing units were either destroyed or severely damaged; 15,000 housing units suffered some damage; Multiple water and sanitation facilities and infrastructure were damaged (leaving approximately 800,000 people without regular access to safe water), 58 education facilities, nine hospitals and nineteen primary healthcare centers all suffered some damage. There was an estimated $89m worth of damage to the energy, agricultural, and industrial sectors. Again, these acts of violence are clearly disproportionate and not necessary for the proclaimed goal of “Israeli security.” They arise out of and are meant to cement and achieve total and absolute Israeli Jewish sovereign power over the Palestinians.

This drive towards supreme sovereignty explains why all this destruction in just 11 days, piled as it is on top of the long continuum of Israeli violence, did not satisfy the majority of the Israeli public. When the ceasefire came into effect, a poll published on Israel’s Channel 12 “indicated that 72 percent of Israelis thought the air campaign in Gaza should continue, whereas 24 percent said Israel should agree to a cease-fire.” Israelis communicated a range of expressions and statements, from the indifferent to the euphoric, for their desire to continue unleashing Israel’s war machine. Many videos appeared on social media of Israeli civilians dancing and celebrating the onslaught on Gaza and the violence against Palestinians everywhere, chanting “Death to Arabs,” and “May your village burn down,” and showing a general disregard for the death and destruction of the Palestinians as a people.

When this dehumanisation of Palestinians appears in mainstream media and public discourse within Israeli and Euro-American spaces, it is framed in a normalizing manner. For example, last year in a New York Times report, the desire for the majority of Israelis to continue the onslaught on Gaza is framed as Israelis simply wanting a “final conclusion” to “a very unpleasant situation”, and a “decisive victory against Hamas.”

Even when Israelis expressed genocidal wishes against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, when an Israeli person states, “the government should wipe out Gaza once and for all,” even in that situation, the CBC’s flagship nightly news programme, The National, found a way to cleanse and make presentable these expressions of a genocidal and eliminatory drive. In their feeble narratives, the New York Times presented Israeli quotes as frustrated Israelis who just want peace and quiet; the CBC framed the genocidal statement as scared Israelis who want security and are understandably angry. Both narratives offer nothing in the way of revealing the reality of violence, but rather themselves participating in the concealment of that reality. These orientalist, racialised, and violent narratives are part of the operation of settler-colonial violence, and as such, cannot reveal it.

That’s where we are still today in the same place we have been for decades: mainstream and dominant international discourse focuses on distractions and distorted pictures of what is happening to Palestinians, while Israel continues to unleash violence that is caused by and geared towards the goal of supreme supremacy.

This is a form of sovereignty that has nothing to do with the complex and rich religion of Judaism and the Jewish tradition. Rather, following the logic of colonial modernity, this form of sovereignty, akin to other Euro-American (neo)colonial and settler-colonial states such as the United States, seeks to establish a kind of power that diverse cultures and religions across human history have reserved only for the gods: a kind of power that allows an entity to act with impunity because it is the first and last judge.

This latest attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound has little to nothing to do with a supposed Muslim-Jewish clash and has much more to do with a form of sovereignty that attempts to secure and establish a god-like power for a particular settler- colonial nationality. So long as the Israeli project is driven by the aspiration towards supreme power and sovereignty over Palestinians and Palestine, then we will be writing about Israeli attacks on Palestinian worshipers for years to come. Nothing short of a foundational transformation in the logic and structures of colonial modernity will prevent what is, at this moment, an inevitable outcome: more death and destruction for Palestinians and Palestine.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

US-China relations are at a “tipping point”, with the two powers on the brink of a technological and cultural cold war, former Washington ambassador to China Max Baucus warned on Tuesday.

Among the factors fueling the downward spiral were the continuing barrage of US sanctions targeting Beijing, rising nationalism in China, growing domestic pressure in the country as Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks a third term, and a class of Chinese officials who are “hypercritical” of the US, he said.

Former US ambassador to Beijing Max Baucus. Photo: Handout alt=Former US ambassador to Beijing Max Baucus. Photo: Handout>

“We’re at a tipping point here,” Baucus told a virtual event hosted by the US-China Policy Foundation. “This current trend is very, very troublesome to me and it’s going to take a lot of work to turn that around.”

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Baucus served as president Barack Obama’s envoy to Beijing from 2014-2017, overseeing efforts to forge avenues of cooperation, even as tensions simmered around human rights issues and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Relations plummeted under Obama’s successor Donald Trump, whose trade war with Beijing and numerous other China-focused policies have largely remained intact under President Joe Biden.

“The relationship has gone downhill quite precipitously in the last several years and it’s getting worse,” said Baucus. “I thought maybe that we hit bottom after Trump [for] four years and Biden took over, but it’s still going south.”

While China extends the reach of its economic might through the Belt and Road Initiative, the US is forming alliances in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, Baucus said, expressing concern that Washington and Beijing were “just isolating each other into two separate, big camps “.

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“It just seems like we’re moving more and more toward a kind of cold war. It’s not a nuclear cold war but a technological cold war, a cultural cold war.”

His warning coincides with a visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to South America, where Chinese investment projects have fueled growing scrutiny in Washington of Beijing’s development finance ambitions.

Speaking ahead of the trip, a US official said Blinken would urge Panama to remain “clear-eyed” about how China and Chinese companies engaging in 5G infrastructure would “use your data”.

US officials are also scrambling to respond to an emerging security pact between China and the Solomon Islands, an agreement that could allow Chinese warships to stop in the archipelago nation, according to a draft leaked online.

Talks this week between officials from the US, Japan, Australia and New Zealand saw all four countries agree on the “serious risks to a free and open Indo-Pacific” posed by the security framework, according to a White House readout released on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Beijing has accused the US of “stoking bloc confrontation” within the region, with foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin warning on Tuesday that “attempts to meddle with and obstruct Pacific island countries’ cooperation with China will be in vain.”

Adding further strain to already tense US-China relations is Beijing’s refusal to publicly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, complicating Washington’s attempts to lead a global, united response to the attack.

Faced with the “dire” state of US-China relations, Baucus on Tuesday implored those working on the relationship to be more “attentive” to what their counterparts were saying, decrying the steep decline in visits and communications between the two countries’ officials in recent years.

And while he was critical of what he described as the tendency of Chinese officials to rigidly to talking points and restrict access for US diplomats, Baucus also spoke out against mainstream political rhetoric in the US that greater engagement with China would lead them to become more like us”.

“We Americans tend to think we have a better idea how to run the world than other people and that’s an arrogant view,” he said.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2022 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Politicians in Finland are due to start debating whether the country should seek membership in the NATO military alliance after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted a spike in political and public support for joining the transatlantic bloc.

The session on Wednesday parliament comes despite warnings by Russia of a nuclear buildup in the Baltic should Finland and neighbor Sweden join NATO.

“I think it will happen quite fast. Within weeks, not within months,” Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin said last week, referring to her country deciding on whether to apply for membership.

Finland’s 200 members of parliament have received a government-commissioned “white paper” that assessed the implications of NATO membership alongside other security options, such as increased bilateral defense agreements.

The report does not make recommendations but stresses that without NATO membership Finland – a European Union member state that shares a 1,300km (810-mile) border with Russia – enjoys no security guarantees, despite currently being a partner of the alliance. It also says the “deterrent effect” on Finland’s defense would be “considerably greater” inside the bloc, while noting that membership also carried obligations for Finland to assist other NATO states.

Sweden is also discussing whether to submit a membership bid following Russia’s February 24 invasion. A poll on Wednesday showed that 57 percent of Sweden now favored NATO membership, up from 51 percent in March. Those opposed to joining fell to 21 percent from 24 percent, while those who were undecided dipped to 22 percent from 25 percent.

‘Highly likely’

In Finland, after two decades of public support for NATO membership remaining steady at 20-30 percent, the war caused a surge in those in favor to more than 60 percent, according to opinion polls.

Public statements gathered by Finnish media suggest half of the 200 MPs now support membership, with only 12 opposing it. Others say they will announce a position after detailed discussions.

The Finnish government said it hopes to build a consensus over the coming weeks, with MPs due to hear from a number of security experts.

On Saturday, Finland’s European Affairs Minister Tytti Tuppurainen said she believed a Finnish application was “highly likely”.

“But the decision is not yet made,” she told Britain’s Sky News.

However, the Finns “seem to have already made up their mind and there is a huge majority for the NATO membership”.

Many analysts predict Finland could submit a bid in time for a NATO summit in June. Any membership applications must be accepted by all 30 NATO states, a process that could take four months to a year.

Finland has so far received public assurances from NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg that the alliance’s door remains open, and support from several members.

But Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said last week that Sweden and Finland should join NATO, then Russia would have to strengthen its land, naval and air forces in the Baltic Sea.

Medvedev also explicitly raised the nuclear threat by saying that there could be no more talk of a “nuclear-free” Baltic – where Russia has its Kaliningrad exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.

Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto said Russia’s response could include airspace and territorial violations and hybrid attacks, which Finnish NATO proponents believe the country is well prepared to withstand.

Finland declared independence in 1917 after 150 years of Russian rule.

During World War II, its vastly outnumbered army fought off a Soviet invasion, before a peace deal saw it cede several border areas to Moscow.

The Nordic nation remained neutral during the Cold War in exchange for Soviet guarantees not to invade.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Finland firmly aligned itself with the West, by joining the EU and becoming a close partner of NATO.

Successive Finnish leaders shied away from full membership believing that military non-alignment was the best way to maintain working relations with the Kremlin.

Neighboring Sweden is also considering its neutral position. A growing majority of Swedes are now in favor of joining NATO, a poll showed on Wednesday.

Sweden has not been at war since the time of Napoleon and has built its security policy on “non-participation in military alliances”. But like Finland, the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a “special military operation”, has forced a radical rethink.

Michael McFaul, a former Obama-era US ambassador to Russia, on Tuesday confessed his shock at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “evil” in Ukraine.

“I need to admit, I did not expect him to be as evil in the way he is fighting this war as he has been,” McFaul told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.

Let’s also remember. They could have cleared up Bucha. They could have hid that. They didn’t do that,” he said, referencing the massacre by Russian troops that has been uncovered in the commuter town close to Ukraine’s capital Kyiv. “They left those bodies on purpose as a way to terrorize the Ukrainian people.”

McFaul, now a professor of political science at Stanford University who said he penned his first piece calling Putin an autocrat in 2000, also issued a blunt reminder about how Putin’s planned takeover of the country has gone awry as he launched a full-scale offensive in the east.

“Remember, Putin has lost the war for Ukraine,” McFaul said, noting the “original intention to swallow up all of Ukraine because Ukrainians are just Russians with accents” had been unsuccessful.

Putin has “failed to take Kyiv” or any other major Ukrainian cities and had “failed at his major objectives” in the war, McFaul added.

Watch the full interview here: