When Finnish authorities detained the cargo ship Fitburg on New Year’s Eve 2025 after undersea telecommunications cables between Helsinki and Tallinn were severed, the response was swift and coordinated.
Border Guard helicopter deployment, vessel seizure within hours, criminal investigation launched immediately.
A year earlier, Finland had executed a nearly identical operation—seizing the oil tanker Eagle S after it damaged the Estlink-2 power cable and four telecommunications cables.
Both times, government agencies, private telecom companies, and military units worked from rehearsed protocols.
This is Finland’s comprehensive security model in action. As the European Commission implements its Preparedness Union Strategy announced in March 2025, Finland stands among the very few member states that have already operationalised what Brussels is still designing.
Finland can already shelter 85% of its citizens
While the commission debates minimum preparedness criteria for hospitals and schools, Finland has spent 80 years building something more fundamental: a society-wide consensus that security is everyone’s responsibility.
Finland joined Nato in April 2023 with public support above 80 percent and infrastructure to shelter approximately 4.8 million people — around 85 percent of the population. According to the OECD Trust Survey (2023), 82 percent of Finns trust government to protect lives in emergencies — nearly 30 percentage points above the OECD average.
The innovation isn’t the framework itself. It’s how Finland operationalises it through mechanisms that blur the line between public and private, civilian and military, peacetime and crisis.
The National Emergency Supply Agency maintains strategic stockpiles through “sector pools” bringing together officials and business leaders. National Defence Courses have trained thousands of senior figures over decades, creating networks that activate automatically when crisis strikes.
Even Finland’s civil defence shelters serve as parking garages in peacetime.
On 1 January 2026, Finland implemented legislation raising the reservist age from 60 to 65 — expanding the country’s trained reserve force toward one million citizens by 2031.
The system assumes disruption rather than hoping to avoid it.
For parts of central Europe, such as my native Slovakia, the contrast is instructive. When institutional trust collapses — Slovak trust in courts dropped to 31 percent in the OECD Trust Survey — societies can’t execute collective responses.
According to GLOBSEC Trends 2025, less than half of Slovak citizens would be willing to defend their country. The problem isn’t absent legislation or institutions, but absent culture: resilience understood not as civic responsibility but as a technical problem for the defence ministry.
72-hours emergency supplies
Finland avoided this trap by making resilience bipartisan across generations.
The comprehensive security strategy, formalized in the early 1990s and updated periodically, enjoys cross-spectrum support.
When Finnish authorities tell citizens to maintain 72 hours of emergency supplies, compliance is high. When governments lacking credibility make similar appeals, cynicism prevails.
The commission has noticed — particularly after Ukraine pushed resilience from abstract concept to operational necessity.
The Preparedness Union Strategy’s Action Plan explicitly references whole-of-society approaches. But institutional interest hasn’t translated into systemic change.
Most European countries still treat security as something governments provide rather than something society builds together
The obstacles are real. Finland’s model evolved from specific circumstances — proximity to Russia, memories of the Winter War, high social trust.
But transferable mechanisms exist: defence courses building cross-sector networks, public-private partnerships securing infrastructure, regular coordination exercises. The question isn’t whether Finland’s history can be replicated — it’s whether its concrete tools can be adapted.
The deeper challenge is cultural. Finland’s comprehensive security works because Finns view national defence as collective obligation backed by universal conscription.
Many western European societies abandoned such thinking decades ago, treating security as a service purchased from professional forces. That paradigm is collapsing under threats that don’t respect boundaries between war and peace, foreign and domestic, military and civilian.
Brussels can take these three steps
If Europe is serious about implementing the Preparedness Union Strategy, three steps would signal commitment beyond documentation.
First, launching of pilot defence courses in five member states by Q3 2026. The commission’s Preparedness Task Force should design intensive programs adapted from Finland’s model, bringing together officials, business leaders, and civil society representatives.
Second, we need to establish preparedness benchmarks that measure societal coordination, not just stockpiles.
Nato revised its resilience framework after Ukraine; the EU should incorporate metrics on cross-sector exercises, public-private coordination mechanisms, and public awareness of preparedness responsibilities.
Third, the 2026 budget priorities need to match the rhetoric. That means funding not just defence hardware but the unglamorous work of building institutional capacity: training programmes, coordination platforms, regular exercises involving civilian and military actors.
For democracies where cohesion is fraying, where trust is eroding, where citizens feel alienated from protective institutions, Finland offers both inspiration and warning.
Build resilience before you need it, or discover its absence when crisis strikes.
The Preparedness Union Strategy gives Brussels an ambitious timeline to turn principles into practice. Finland shows what success looks like. The question is whether Europe’s institutions will study it — or merely admire it.