New Delhi, June 7 -- For the leader of a country sharing more than 1,300 kilometres of border with Russia, Alexander Stubb's message was striking in its composure. The Finnish president said Sunday he does not believe Russia poses a genuine military threat to the Baltic states or any NATO country - and that, at some point, Europe will need to rebuild political relations with Moscow whether it likes it or not.

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His reasoning followed the same logic that Russian President Vladimir Putin had laid out at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum just days earlier. At SPIEF, Putin called suggestions that Russia might strike a NATO member not just nonsense but a deliberate provocation - one engineered, he argued, to justify defence s...