Ålanders Want Russia's Consulate Gone, but Cling to Demilitarisation That Shields It

• Most Åland residents want Russia's consulate removed, according to a new HBL survey
• A majority also fear Baltic Sea hostilities could directly strike the archipelago
• Support for Åland's century-old demilitarised status remains strong despite the security concerns
• Finland lacks a clear unilateral mechanism to close the consulate without broader diplomatic consequences

A majority of residents on Åland — Finland's autonomous, Swedish-speaking archipelago in the Baltic Sea — want Russia's consulate expelled from the islands, according to a survey conducted by Hufvudstadsbladet. The same poll found that most Ålanders worry that military hostilities in the Baltic could reach their shores. Yet support for the islands' century-old demilitarised status remains firm — a combination of positions that, taken together, describes a community caught between its founding identity and the reality outside its harbours.

Russia's consulate on Åland is one of the last remaining Russian diplomatic outposts in the Nordic region. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Nordic countries collectively expelled over a hundred Russian diplomats, and several consulates across the region were shut down. Åland's survived. The consulate's formal purpose has historically been consular services and fisheries-related matters, but its continued presence on a strategically vital archipelago — sitting squarely between Sweden and Finland, controlling key shipping lanes — carries a different weight in 2025 than it did in 2005.

The legal picture is tangled. Åland's demilitarised and neutralised status was established by the League of Nations in 1921 and reinforced by the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty between Finland and the Soviet Union. Russia, as the Soviet Union's successor state, is a party to the arrangement. Finland's government could, in principle, declare Russian diplomatic staff personae non gratae — that is a sovereign prerogative — but closing the consulate entirely touches the broader treaty framework that governs Åland's status. Helsinki has so far avoided the move, wary of giving Moscow a pretext to declare the demilitarisation regime void. The paradox is precise: the demilitarisation treaty constrains Finland more than it constrains Russia, because Finland is the party that actually respects it.

This is the core tension the HBL survey exposes. Ålanders overwhelmingly value demilitarisation — it is not merely a legal arrangement but a civic identity, woven into the islands' self-image as a zone of peace. But the regime was negotiated in a world where the Baltic Sea was not an active theatre of hybrid warfare, where undersea cables were not being severed by ships sailing under opaque flags, and where Russia was not waging a land war in Europe. The question of whether demilitarisation still serves Åland's security or has become a constraint that primarily benefits the one power with an interest in keeping the islands undefended is one that the survey's respondents seem to feel but not fully resolve.

Finland's NATO membership, formalised in 2023, adds another layer. Åland's demilitarised status predates NATO by decades and exists independently of it, but the alliance's defence planners cannot ignore a 6,700-island archipelago sitting across the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia. In wartime, Åland's status would be tested immediately — and the only country with a diplomatic facility already on the ground would be the adversary.

The Åland survey captures a population that has absorbed the new Baltic reality without abandoning the old Åland idea. Whether both can coexist is not a question Ålanders alone will answer. Russia's consulate remains open. Finland's defence planners draw their maps around the islands. And the 1921 treaty, written for a Europe that no longer exists, still governs the archipelago where Europe's next crisis may well arrive first.

Sources: Hufvudstadsbladet