It would be natural to assume that Sweden was entirely focused on its relations with Nazi Germany during the years following the invasion of Scandinavia by the Germans. Certainly, Germany controlled all essential Swedish supplies due to its Skagerrak blockade and represented the most immediate military and political threat to the independent, democratic Swedish state. Yet the Swedish leadership was almost equally preoccupied by relations with the warring countries to the east, that is Finland and Russia, and to a minor extent the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The Winter War had mobilised Sweden to aid its Finnish neighbour against Russian aggression. Sweden had striven to secure a peace in order to protect its borders from Russian encroachment as well as to lower the political temperature in the Baltic region. Domestically, the Government sought to assuage overlapping anti-communist and anti-Russian Swedish opinion. Now that the Finnish army had joined with the German army to recover its lost territory after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Russians had annexed the Baltic states, Sweden was faced with a fresh set of challenges in order to maintain its security to the east.