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... In September 2021, just a few months after he took up his post as defense attache at the US Embassy in Helsinki, Col. John Kent was breathing a sigh of relief after embassy staff helped coordinate a sensitive, high-level meeting between then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Chief of Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov.

That the face-to-face between longtime antagonists took place in the Finnish capital was no fluke; the historically neutral Nordic city has a decades-long tradition of hosting crucial summits, including Cold War dialogues between American and Soviet leaders that helped stave off a third world war. (It also was the site of the controversial 2018 meeting between then-US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.)

So after the Milley-Gerasimov meeting was over, Kent thought, "Hey, that's it. That's our big thing we're going to do during my three years in Helsinki."

Putin, however, had other plans. His full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 galvanized the public in Finland, shattering more than a half-century of relative neutrality, pushing Helsinki to apply for NATO membership and turning the attention of Washington, and the world, to European security --" especially for nations like Finland that share a border with Russia.

The result was a deluge of new activity for the US staff in Helsinki, from helping to usher Finland through the bureaucratic gauntlet that is NATO accession, to negotiating a critical US-Finland Defense Cooperation Agreement, to preparing for high-profile visits by President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. ...