To a distant observer, it might seem like Russia and Finland should be happy neighbors, but that would be far from reality as the two gear up for conflict.
Finland said it's so concerned about a buildup of Russian military operations and personnel along the Finland-Russia border that the Finnish parliament voted this past week to place antipersonnel mines along the border.
Mining a nation's border is considered by military leaders to be a harsh but serious response to a military threat and can be seen to demonstrate alarm on the part of its leaders.
Russia has made several veiled threats against Finland since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allowed Finland to join its ranks more than two years ago, a move that Russia treated like a betrayal.
Finland voted unanimously on June 19th to leave the Ottawa Convention, a 1999 international treaty aimed at banning the use of human-targeted land mines.
The Finnish government wants to bury landmines along its Russian border because the nation is seeing a huge stockpiling of ordnance and troops on the other side of that border.
The Nordic nation is enlarging its military and hosting a new command for NATO as it moves to meet what some residents consider a challenge from Russian leaders.
One Finnish government report in 2024 described "a heightened risk of an armed conflict," because of Russia's increasing development of military capabilities since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
It's with that in mind that authorities in Finland are keeping a close eye on Russia, whose buildup at the border has been going on for many months and perhaps years.
The Kremlin was adamantly against the Nordic nation joining its neighbor Sweden in becoming a part of NATO, reacting with a vague threat of "military-technical response measures," according to the UK Daily Mail.
With Russia's strong sense of history going back hundreds of years, it's not surprising that it feels a certain power and claim over its neighbors and may have been somewhat jealous when Finland joined the European Union in 1995, while Russia was still recovering from the fall of the Soviet Union a few years earlier..
Finland was once part of Russia: Following the Finnish War of 1809, the nation was ceded to the Russian Empire and stayed part of Russia for more than 100 years, first breaking away in the early days of World War I.
And Finland fought against Russia several times during World War II, so there is a certain amount of bad blood that still runs between the two nations.
But Russian leadership appears deadly serious about its designs on Finland, even evoking the "nuclear option" should the nation appear hostile to Mother Russia.
In April of this year, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned Sweden and Finland that, as NATO members now, they are "part of a bloc hostile to us, which means they automatically became a target for our armed forces, including potential retaliatory strikes and even the nuclear component or preventive measures within the framework of a military doctrine."