Russians are quoting a Finnish politician, who isn’t well-known and regularly appears on the Russian propaganda channel RT. In fact, only 11% of Finnish citizens regret joining NATO.
With dramatic headlines like “Finland calls NATO membership a terrible mistake,” a quote from Armando Mema, a member of the Finnish Freedom Alliance party, is being circulated in the pro-Russian Internet segments. Mema stated that “Finland is now in a difficult strategic position between two superpowers. The choice of an anti-Russian position, as it turned out, negatively affected Finland’s strategic interests. Joining NATO was the worst deal Finland could have made. Finland should have waited before making such a hasty decision”.
The “statement” that has spread online is actually a regular post in X made by a Finnish activist, who is known in his country primarily for his ties to Russia. According to a story in the Finnish newspaper Ilta Sanomat, 32-year-old Armando Mema, an accountant of Albanian-Italian origin, is much more popular in Russian media than in Finland, where few people know him. “Mema is so quickly getting into Russian media that he has become an absolute favorite on the Yandex news service. If you search for the latest news about Finland or Finns on the news service, Mema rises to the top of the search results almost every day… So Russians get the impression that Meme is a famous and influential Finnish politician,” the article says. This belief is reinforced by the fact that materials about Meme in Russian media often illustrate his photo against the background of the hall or the parliament building. In fact, neither Mema nor the party he belongs to, the Freedom Alliance, are represented in parliament because they did not receive enough votes in the elections. There is not even a page about Armando Mema on Wikipedia, and his official profile on X, where he wrote his statement about NATO, has less than seven thousand subscribers. This indicates that Mema has minimal popularity and influence in his native Finland.
However, in June 2024, he attracted attention in Russia by attempting to disrupt Ursula von der Leyen’s speech in Helsinki, for which he received a fine of 110 euros for “inflicting bodily harm on an official.” Russian media wrote a lot about Mema’s case, exposing allegedly “blatant” violations of freedom of speech in Finland. Since then, Armando Mema and his statements have regularly appeared in Russian headlines, which he himself is very pleased about: “The Russian media give me the opportunity to give interviews and freely express my opinion. Now I am everywhere in Russian news, while the Finnish media continues to censor me, it is unbelievable,” Mema wrote on his Telegram channel.
Most of the quotes spread by Russian media come either from Mema’s posts on social networks or from his interview with RT. In particular, he calls on Volodymyr Zelensky to stop strikes on Russian territory and “focus on dialogue.” His demand to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to stop arming Kyiv, allegedly in order to avoid a nuclear war, was also actively spread in Russia. Mema regularly promotes narratives about the need to recognize Russia’s “new borders,” NATO’s inability to protect Finland, and the country’s economic exhaustion due to its support for Ukraine.
According to a study by the Finnish Forum for Politics and Business EVA, conducted in April 2025, Finns’ confidence in NATO’s security guarantees has indeed decreased somewhat due to US foreign policy. However, 66% of the country’s population still supports Finland’s membership in NATO, and only 11% consider the country’s entry into the alliance a mistake.
We refuted a similar narrative in our article about the German “expert” Ralph Niemeyer. Like his Finnish “colleague”, he has no political authority or weight in his homeland. Unlike Mema, Niemeyer not only appears on Russian channels, but also fled to Moscow after being accused of extremist activities.
