ROVANIEMI (Finland) (AFP) – Finland is hosting its first large-scale NATO artillery exercise since the Nordic nation joined the military alliance last year, with live fire drills starting on Sunday.
The exercise conducted in the northern Lapland region in November is part of Dynamic Front 25, the largest NATO artillery exercise ever held in Europe, with fire drills in Finland as well as Estonia, Germany, Romania and Poland.
Running from 4 to 28 November, it marks the first time NATO allies are practicing artillery fire at a large scale on Finnish soil.
The Nordic nation, which shares a border with Russia, joined NATO last year, dropping decades of military non-alignment after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
"We work on interoperability with our allies, to carry out artillery fire in coherence with our NATO allies," said Romain, a French army captain and unit commander of the Ecrins battery of the 93rd mountain artillery regiment, giving only his first name.
His team was dressed in warm camouflage uniforms in a field where the temperature was a few degrees below zero Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit).
Up to 3,600 soldiers from Finland, the United States, Sweden, Britain, France and some other NATO members were rehearsing as a damp cold took hold of Lapland's vast arctic landscapes.
The Lapland firing range and training area, called Rovajarvi, is Europe's biggest.
"The area itself is the reason why allies want to come to the Rovajarvi exercise area to train", Finnish Colonel Janne Makitalo, director of the exercise, told AFP.
It allows for "multi-sided tactical fire exchanges for field artillery" while training soldiers to handle the challenging conditions and varying terrain in the Arctic region, Makitalo said.