The Finnish parliament voted on Thursday on Thursday to attract a large international treaty on antipersonnel land mines, or APLS, as the Nordic country seeks to increase its defenses against an increasingly secure Russian next door. Finland, which joined NATO in 2023, shares an 830-mile land border with Russia and says land mines can be used to protect its wide and broken terrain in the event of an attack, according to Apea. Finnish lawmakers voted 157-18 to move forward on a government proposal to leave the Ottawa Convention seeking to complete the use of APLS across the globe.

The Nordics and Baltics have been sounding the alarm in a possible Russian incursion since Russia began a full -scale occupation of Ukraine in 2022. Analysts say Ukraine is one of the most affected places by land mines and explosives rejected as a result of Russia’s constant war. The Ottawa Convention was signed in 1997 and entered into force in 1999. Nearly three dozen countries did not accept it, including some of the leading and past main manufacturers and users of land mining such as the United States, China, India, Pakistan, South Korea and Russia.

In a report released last year by Land Minor Monitor, the international supervisor said land mines were still being actively used in 2023 and 2024 by Russia, Myanmar, Iran and North Korea. In the Baltic, lawmakers in Latvia and Lithuania earlier this year voted to leave the treaty. Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said civilians would pay the price if more countries leave the treaty. “The global consensus that once made the mines Antipersonnel a symbol of inhumation has begun to fractures,” she said in a news announcement earlier this week. “This is not just a legal withdrawal in the Radiot paper to endanger countless lives and turn into decades of difficult humanitarian progress.”

(More Finland story.)