Speaking to AFP, Hakkanen said Russia's cooperation with China had "gone so far" that "China is currently massively financing Russia's war chest".

"Russia would not be able to wage war for very long with its own resources. India, of course, provides funding in other ways, but China is doing so quite deliberately," the minister said after meeting with his Nordic counterparts in Helsinki.

"It is supplying military components, cooperating in the defence industry, and organising joint military exercises and various other large-scale activities in the Arctic, Indo-Pacific and European regions," he added, calling it a big but manageable challenge for the Western military alliance NATO.

Nordic countries are stepping up their defence cooperation to counter future threats while supporting NATO's capabilities in the north, Hakkanen said.

"Today, we already discussed the use of 250 Nordic fighter aircrafts from the air forces as a unified force," he said.

Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Norway and Denmark are planning to triple ammunition production and develop military mobility corridors in the Nordic region, he added.

Finland, which shares a 1,340-kilometre (830-mile) border with Russia, dropped decades of military non-alignment by joining NATO in 2023, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.