Wars and rumours of war have resulted in millions of Swedes receiving copies of a government pamphlet advising them on how to survive an armed conflict.
The move comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday signed a revised nuclear doctrine declaring a conventional attack on Russia by any nation supported by a nuclear power will be considered a joint attack on his country.
Putin’s endorsement of the new nuclear deterrent policy comes on the 1,000th day after he sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
The BBC reports In case of crisis or war has been updated from six years ago because of what the government in Stockholm calls the worsening security situation, by which it means Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The booklet – which comes in a range of languages including English, Farsi, Arabic, and Somali alongside Swedish – is also twice the size and can be read here.
Neighbouring Finland has also just published its own fresh advice online on “preparing for incidents and crises”. Norway is following suit.
A man holds the new version of the preparedness booklet “If the crisis or war comes”, that will be distributed to all households, on November 18, 2024 in Stockholm. Sweden began sending some five million pamphlets to residents urging them to prepare for the possibility of war, as neighbouring Finland launched a new preparedness website. (CLAUDIO BRESCIANI/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images)
Millions of households in the Nordic nations will be given the booklets with instructions on how to prepare for the effects of military conflicts, communications outages and power cuts.
Sweden’s Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said last month that as the global context had changed, information to Swedish households had to reflect the changes too, the BBC story outlines.
Earlier this year he warned that “there could be war in Sweden”, although that was seen as a wake-up call because he felt that moves towards rebuilding that “total defence” were progressing too slowly.
Because of its long border with Russia and its experience of war with the Soviet Union in World War Two, Finland has always maintained a high level of defence.
Sweden, however, scaled down its infrastructure and only in recent years started gearing up again.
Both Sweden and Finland joined NATO in the past two years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as Breitbart News reported.
The Kremlin previously warned that should Sweden and Finland decide to join NATO there would be “military and political repercussions.”