Parliamentary Roundtable on Russia Expertise and Nordic Security
17 February 2026
After the Moscow Peace negotiations March 1940, J.K. Paasikivi remained as the Finnish envoy in Moscow. In late spring, a new young diplomat arrived – Jorma Vanamo.
Var har domaren lärt sig ryska?
Paasikivi was known for his fiery temperament. When he realized that the new diplomat did not speak Russian, he completely lost his temper and literally threw the young man out of the room. Things eventually calmed down, and Vanamo’s skill at playing the piano helped smooth things over as well.
Later, Vanamo served as ambassador in both Moscow and Stockholm and ended his career as the State Secretary of the Foreign Ministry.
You must know and speak Russian if you want to deal with Russia – full stop!
When I arrived in Moscow as an attaché in April 1973, I soon realized that all my Swedish and Norwegian colleagues were fluent in Russian. My own Russian was decent, but only just. I quickly learned that my Scandinavian colleagues – as well as many correspondents and businesspeople in Moscow – had learned their Russian at the respective national Tolkskola.
I was impressed. Fifteen years later, as Head of the Security Policy Division at the MFA, I visited Tolkskolan in Uppsala together with Major Harri Ohra-aho, then deputy military attaché at the Embassy in Stockholm. Major General Harri Ohra-aho retired in 2019 as Head of Military Intelligence. He played a key role in the process that renewed and modernized Finland’s intelligence legislation in 2019.
The concept of militarily organized language instruction within the Defence Forces – serving not only the military but society as a whole –appealed to us. I first tested the idea in the late 1990s, but General Ohra-aho and I only began seriously developing it in the 2010s, in cooperation with Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), which had strong Russian studies and was eager to support the Defence Forces if a Tolkskolan were to be established at the nearby garrison.
Sadly, we failed to convince the Chief of Defence and the Foreign Minister.
Why do we need organized and disciplined instruction in Russian? The answer is quite simple. The regular school system and universities simply do not provide students with the necessary level of skill. Interest in studying Russian is minimal today – for understandable reasons – which runs contrary to our national interest. At the same time, we have a growing number of people of Russian origin, whose children are often fully bilingual. This situation reminds us of the years following the Russian Revolution, when Russian immigrants (though not very numerous) together with Finns who had worked in St. Petersburg provided the bulk of the Russian speakers needed in intelligence and the economy.
Today, however, the situation is different. The army and security services cannot employ people with dual citizenship, which applies to most people of Russian origin in Finland. We therefore need a reliable system to train young Finns to a high level of Russian-language proficiency.
Given the strong public support for Finland’s conscription system and the growing number of women voluntarily reporting for military service, it would not be difficult to find the twenty or so motivated youngsters needed each year to study Russian at a Tolkskolan. As both Finland and Sweden today are members of Nato a joint venture could provide a new approach. We have the proven Swedish model to draw and develop on, and I am convinced the public response would be overwhelmingly positive.