With the mainstream media breathlessly focused on the Left’s shamefully weak banana-republican indictment of Donald Trump, a number of important news stories have slipped under the radar.

The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland lists seven such stories — from the House’s government weaponization hearings to OPEC’s oil production cuts — and here’s an eighth: Finland joined NATO yesterday, becoming the 31st member of the Cold War-era military alliance.

Why is this important? As the old real estate adage goes, location, location, location. Finland, which lies just west of Russia, shares an 830-mile border with its thuggish neighbor, and its decision to join NATO thus doubles the size of the organization’s territorial border with Russia. And this membership, of course, gives Finland the collective security guarantee of NATO’s Article 5, which reads, “An armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”

Membership thus has its privileges, but it wasn’t easy. As Fox News reports: “The NATO treaty requires that member countries unanimously approve any new additions to the alliance. Turkey was the sole country to formally oppose Findland [sic] and Sweden’s entry, arguing that their policies supported certain Kurdish rebel groups that Turkey opposed.”

The Finns settled that issue with Turkish President Recep Erdogan, who then removed his country’s opposition. Next up is Sweden, which borders Finland to the west and doesn’t share a border with Russia, but its addition would further solidify the Nordic land mass to Russia’s northwest. Sweden, though, has yet to win Turkey’s approval, so there’s still some geopolitical horse-trading to be done.

NATO has said that it doesn’t intend to build up its military presence in Finland, but this is small consolation to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine some 400 days ago was the impetus for Finland’s desire to join NATO. Vlady, meet blowback.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Finland ousted its 37-year-old leftist prime minister, Sanna Marin, who finished third in a narrow three-way race on Sunday as part of that country’s parliamentary elections. The voting breakdown, which gives power to a center-right coalition, was 19.9% for Marin’s Social Democrats, 20.8% for National Coalition Party candidate and prime minister-elect Petteri Orpo, and 20.1% for the right-wing populist party known as The Finns.

In other troubling news for Putin, Donald Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to express his support for Ukraine and thus the continuation of our nation’s proxy war with Russia.

While we deeply and vehemently disagree with Joe Biden’s foreign policy generally, and we thus disagree with Secretary Pompeo’s decision to back an enormous sum of U.S. taxpayer dollars to support one deeply corrupt nation in its border war with another deeply corrupt nation, we appreciate his insistence that other nations join in and help spread-load the expense. “We should do two things,” he said. “We should provide them the things that we can. And we should demand that other nations, not just Europe, but certainly Europe, step in and do their part as well. That’s important. This needs to be not just an American support of Ukraine, but the world standing up to Vladimir Putin, who has so viciously attacked a sovereign nation.”