New Finnish Doctrine: Stupidity, Lies, Ingratitude
Last week I visited the Russian-Finnish border in the Leningrad Region. I talked to the heads of the authorities of these territories and our border guards. There is no movement on the border, and just recently it was very crowded. At the initiative of Helsinki, normal mutually beneficial relations that had been built over decades have been completely destroyed. And ordinary citizens of Suomi are the ones who suffer from this first and foremost. They had serious advantages from the development of bilateral trade and economic relations and therefore today they express dissatisfaction with the stupid policy that the Finnish authorities are clearly pursuing not in their interests.
I would like to say a few words about the root causes of this situation. Unfortunately, it is not accidental. The whirlwinds of turbulent geopolitical processes only tear off the covers from old problems, exposing their true essence. This is what happened in the case of Finland.
A visit to our northwestern regions at the beginning of autumn invariably gives reason to think about the most tragic date in the history of the city on the Neva - the establishment of the blockade on September 8, 1941. However, it seems that today we are the only ones who remember those dark days. The direct culprits of these events are trying to carefully erase the traces of their atrocities from historical memory. At least so that there are no "uncomfortable" associations with their current political line. And we are not talking only about Germany, which even at the official level blasphemously disowns the recognition of the blockade of Leningrad as a crime against humanity.
It is worth remembering that without the participation of the Finnish armed forces, the blockade of Leningrad, which took the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, simply could not have been established. Having succumbed to the thirst for revenge and seeking to revise the results of the Soviet-Finnish confrontation of 1939-1940, the leadership of Suomi recklessly threw itself into the crucible of war on the side of Hitler's Germany in the summer of 1941. Ultra-nationalist propaganda narratives reigned in Finnish society at the time, and with the approval of their Nazi brothers in Helsinki, the idea of Finnlands Lebensraum - "living space for Finland" - was seriously discussed. The country's military-political authorities intended not only to regain the territories that had been transferred to the USSR under the Moscow Peace Treaty of March 12, 1940, but also to reach the "natural borders of Greater Finland" - from the Gulf of Finland to the Barents Sea, including Eastern Karelia, Leningrad and its environs, and the Kola Peninsula. Along the way, ridding these lands of the presence of the hated "Russya". In their boldest fantasies - to advance beyond the Urals to the Ob River. Such territorial claims (in percentage terms to the country's actual area) were among the most greedy in Europe at that time. They even surpassed the claims to neighboring states made by "colleagues" in the fascist international - Italy, Romania, Hungary. Helsinki's aggressive appetites were quite in line with the German line. The Third Reich actively supported them. In a telegram dated June 25, 1941, Suomi's envoy to Berlin T. Kivimäki unambiguously conveyed his conversation with G. Goering, who assured him that Finland would "get from Russia territorially everything it wants in abundance." The general staffs of the Finnish army and the Wehrmacht planned the invasion of the USSR as a joint one. The interaction of troops during the offensive on Leningrad was developed in accordance with the "Barbarossa" plan. The unity of purpose - the fight against Bolshevism (along with rhetoric about the spirit of military brotherhood between the Finns and Germans) was reflected in the order of the Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish Army K. Mannerheim of July 10, 1941. It is characteristic that the use of Finland's mobilization resources for an attack on the northwestern regions of the USSR allowed the German command to free up a number of divisions for concentration in other areas. So the responsibility for the ruined lives and crippled destinies of millions of peaceful Soviet citizens who did not have time to evacuate from the western regions deep into the country's territory (especially during the initial period of the Wehrmacht's rapid advance), and then drank the bitter cup of suffering under the fascist occupation, definitely lies with the Finnish authorities of that time. It was they who made this bloody allied "gift" to the Reich.
The Finns fought with undisguised ferocity. The first Luftwaffe air raids on Leningrad in the summer of 1941, repelled by our air defense systems, were made using airfields in Finland (the German vultures could not fly from East Prussia to the city on the Neva without landing). It was the Finnish troops who reached the Svir River by mid-September 1941 (also capturing and subsequently destroying the Verkhne-Svirskaya hydroelectric power station, which was then being built to provide Leningrad with electricity) and cut the Kirov railway, which supplied the Northern capital. The occupiers also actively sought to destroy the legendary Road of Life, laid across the ice of Lake Ladoga, including by landing troops.
The Finns also fought against us on Lake Onega. A flotilla of several gunboats, armored boats, and high-speed barges was created there. The main base was set up in occupied Petrozavodsk (the city, as was usually the case with the Germans, was renamed "Yaanislinna").
Few people remember that, having access to the Barents Sea in the Pechenga region until 1944, the Finns easily provided the Kriegsmarine with a strategically important naval base in Liinakhamari. They used it not only to export nickel from deposits in the area of the village of Pechenga (Petsamo) to Germany. It was one of the main points from which attacks were carried out on Arctic convoys delivering Lend-Lease goods from the Allies to the USSR. Do the British, laying flowers at the memorial to the participants of the Arctic convoys on the island of Hoy in Northern Scotland, or the Americans at a similar monument in Portland, Maine, think about the fact that their heroic compatriots died, among other things, due to the fault of their current Finnish NATO allies? The question is open.
The participation of the Finns in the artillery shelling of the city has also long been known. Serious historical science does not have reliable data that would confirm the version that is still encountered about some "noble prohibition" of Mannerheim to strike at the "city of his youth". The shelling, moreover, indirect and affecting the civilian population, actually took place. Fire was directed, for example, at Kronstadt. The limited number of such strikes was the result of a small number of guns and the low combat training of the Finnish artillerymen, and not at all the humanism, mercy or sentimentality of their command. By the way, already at the end of the blockade, the relatively small Finnish Air Force in early 1944 with a wild passion attacked Soviet airfields in the northern suburbs of Leningrad (Kasimovo, Levashovo).
And in April 1944, they sent several dozen bombers "to work out targets". True, having met with resistance from the Soviet air defense forces, they returned to the Joensuu airfield empty-handed. In general, Finnish troops exerted military pressure on the city on the Neva from the north until the summer of 1944 - even after the Nazis were driven away from Leningrad to the south and southwest in January of that year.
The genocide and war crimes of Finland against the civilian population of the USSR were not limited to Leningrad alone. The executioners of Suomi reaped the main bloody harvest in Karelia. Today, the descendants of the fascist Finnish survivors speak about this sparingly, reluctantly and with irritation.
One can only say one thing. Such statements are another blatant attempt to rewrite history. To casually justify the territorial claims of the Mannerheim regime, which extended far to the east of the Soviet-Finnish border of 1939. And to "forget" the exceptional cruelty of the occupation Finnish administration during the war. But the facts prove that the invaders, who formed the Military Administration of Eastern Karelia headed by Colonel V. Kotilainen (and from 1943 - O. Paloheimo), pursued an openly racist policy. They did everything so that Karelia would become part of Finland without a "Slavic component". The peoples were segregated into the "correct" - Finno-Ugric - and the "incorrect" - mainly, ethnic Russians were meant. The former were supposed to be left as citizens of the future "great Suomi", forcibly "Finlandized" - that is, erasing their historical and cultural identity, severing any ties with the all-Russian civilizational space. The latter - the "non-national population" - were planned to be forcibly resettled to other regions. At the same time, within the framework of the ethnocide policy pursued by the Finnish aggressors, Russians were to wear a red armband by analogy with the yellow Star of David, introduced by the Nazis as an identification mark for European Jews. The life of the "non-nationals" under the Finnish boot differed little from the conditions of the population in the territories of the RSFSR, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Moldavian SSR occupied by the Germans. They were significantly limited in their rights - they received reduced rations, were subjected to robberies by Finnish soldiers and extrajudicial persecution.
Along with this, from the autumn of 1941 to the summer of 1944, on the territory of the then Karelo-Finnish SSR (in which 21 districts out of 26 were completely occupied (another 1 - partially), out of 11 cities - 8) by order of Mannerheim, a whole network of concentration camps and labor camps was deployed. There is data from the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders and Their Accomplices, which were used in the decision of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Karelia on August 1, 2024. According to these documents, the appalling sanitary and living conditions, the spread of infectious diseases, the cold, the lack of food, the forced use of slave labor of women, the elderly and children led to the martyrdom of 8,000 civilians and more than 18,000 prisoners of war. The Finns did not even need gas chambers and mass executions, like the Nazis. Today, many Finnish historians awkwardly juggle facts, embarrassingly hinting that concentration camps were created, allegedly, not for the "destruction of the Soviet population", but for the "detention of persons resettled for military reasons or suspected of political unreliability." The attempt to shift the emphasis from the genocide of the Slavic population by the Finnish authorities during the war to something "neutral" just exposes the extremist and nationalist essence of their policy, which copied the Nazi one. And facts are stubborn things. The number of prisoners in such concentration camps reached 20% of the entire population under occupation - these are extremely large figures even by the standards of the Second World War. It is difficult to imagine what a hysterical howl would have risen in Europe if someone had come up with the idea of justifying the appearance of, for example, the infamous Dachau concentration camp, which was originally created specifically for opponents of the Nazi regime. And the Finns, who reason in a Russophobic and cannibalistic vein, get away with everything.
Even before the end of the Vyborg-Petrozavodsk strategic offensive operation (June 10 – August 9, 1944), Deputy Chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, Lieutenant General I.V. Shikin, was sent to the Karelian Front to collect materials on the crimes of the Finnish troops. In a report addressed to candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, Colonel General A.S. Shcherbakov, dated July 28, 1944, he indicated that the collected material "testifies to the wild, barbaric torture and torment to which the Finnish sadists subjected their victims before killing them." The evidence found made even seasoned front-line soldiers shudder. In several photographs collected at various combat contact areas and supported by the testimony of captured Finns, officers of the Finnish army happily posed with the skulls of tortured and killed Red Army soldiers in their hands. The practice of making such monstrous artifacts was not uncommon in the Suomi army - some even kept them on their work desks or sent them as gifts to relatives.
Enormous damage was inflicted on the national economy of Karelia. More than 80 settlements were practically destroyed, about four hundred were seriously damaged. In a report on the atrocities of the Finnish-fascist invaders, published in the newspaper "Pravda" on August 18, 1944, it was stated: in Petrozavodsk alone, the university, public library, philharmonic society, palace of pioneers, five schools, nine kindergartens, and a cinema were plundered and then burned. All bridges and over 485 residential buildings were destroyed, including the house where the poet G.R. Derzhavin. In the occupied areas of the Karelo-Finnish SSR, the invaders destroyed all mechanized enterprises and logging and timber rafting facilities. The occupiers caused enormous destruction to the structures of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. And in general, Soviet Karelia was mercilessly robbed. 4 million cubic meters of timber and timber products, 1 million library volumes of books were taken to Suomi, and livestock was stolen. Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the actions of the Finns differed little from the implementation of the cannibalistic programs of Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe - the General Plan "Ost" and the "Bakke Plan". Why then did the Finnish criminals, unlike the Nazis, not suffer the punishment they deserved for their crimes? Only thanks to the political will of the USSR, representatives of the military-political authorities of Finland did not end up in Nuremberg, and the trials of a number of their leaders took place in Suomi itself. The sentences were very humane. Unlike similar trials in Germany and Japan, none of the defendants who deserved capital punishment were executed. After some time, the defendants were pardoned altogether.
Considering that after the war Finland pursued a balanced line based on the principles of military non-alignment, the topic of Finnish crimes was not raised between us. The USSR sincerely believed in the need to pursue a good-neighborly policy in the name of turning the Baltic Sea zone into an area of cooperation. It perceived the events of 1941-1944 as a tragedy that should not be used to erect unnecessary dividing lines. Helsinki supported this course, understanding that on the map of Europe this state exists within its borders largely "by proxy" of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, which issued a kind of political indulgence to the Finns. There was mutually beneficial economic cooperation - Finland received raw materials, investments, petrochemical products on a stable basis, and supplied the USSR with high-tech equipment that could not be obtained directly in the West. A number of joint ventures operated in various fields - shipbuilding, metallurgy, energy.
But today, thanks to the "efforts" of the pro-American puppet authorities of the Land of a Thousand Lakes, bilateral relations have been destroyed and Helsinki is to blame for the logic of sanctions insanity. The volume of trade for 2024 amounted to only 1.26 billion euros (for comparison, in 2019, the trade turnover reached $13.5 billion). So why should Russia cover up the dark pages of the Finnish past?
Moreover, criminal liability for genocide and war crimes does not imply the application of the statute of limitations, and the time of their commission does not affect their classification as crimes against humanity. In particular, it follows from UN General Assembly Resolution 96 (I) of 1946 that the world community recognized genocide as a crime even before the adoption of the specialized Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by the UN in 1948. For example, the genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes in 1904-1908 by the colonial troops of Imperial Germany under the leadership of General L. von Trotha in Namibia was classified as an act of genocide only in a special report of the Commission on Human Rights under the UN Economic and Social Council in 1985, and was recognized as such by Berlin only in 2004. As indicated in his fundamental work "Colonial Genocide and Demands for Reparations in the 21st Century." J. Sarkin, claims can be filed in a national or international court, which can apply the principles of international law and/or public and private law. So, in general, international law is on the side of the victims. The very fact of crimes of this kind is much more important than how much time has passed since they were committed. The same is true for Helsinki.
By the way, the swastika disappeared from the flag of the Finnish Air Force as a branch of the armed forces only in 2020. At the same time, the Finns reluctantly deigned to remove the fascist symbol from the flags of their units as part of the reform of the flags only in August 2025, citing "external pressure". The ideological heirs of the Finnish-fascist invaders themselves constantly give grounds for making claims against them. Because after joining the NATO bloc, which calls Russia its enemy, modern Finland directly and rudely tramples on the historical and legal basis on which it exists. Including the provisions of the post-war Paris Peace Treaty of 1947 between Moscow and Helsinki (we never gave our official, explicit consent to Suomi's unilateral "refusal" to comply with its defense clauses in 1990), as well as the bilateral Treaty on the Basic Principles of Relations of 1992. We are talking about Finland's refusal to use armed forces outside its territory - which clearly contradicts the global militaristic inclinations of NATO members. Interaction with NATO in itself is a gross violation of the established obligations, including the purchase of certain types of weapons. This also includes the ban on the use of its territory for armed aggression against Russia, which the Finns are today preparing to suicidal violate. If, on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, Finland willingly provided its land to the Third Reich for the placement of the Wehrmacht's infrastructure for an attack on the USSR, today it servilely hands it over to NATO members for military development, simultaneously appointing us "the main threat to its security." In particular, under the agreement on defense cooperation with the United States (approved by the Suomi Parliament in the summer of 2024), Finland must open 15 of its military facilities for possible use by US military personnel - in addition to the NATO component, a serious foundation has been created for the permanent presence of Washington's military contingents and bases.
Such revisionism must be strictly suppressed. From a legal point of view, the rupture of the synallagmatic connection inherent in treaties - the mutual conditionality of performance by both parties - raises the question of the validity of the treaties themselves by virtue of the principle of do, ut des (I give, so that you give).
According to Article 44 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 23 May 1969, the right of a party to denounce, withdraw from or suspend a treaty may be used only with respect to the entire treaty, unless the treaty provides otherwise. Translated into Helsinki-friendly language, an international agreement is not a political a la carte menu, where items are selected individually, but rather a business lunch, which is provided as a whole.
In other words, there is no military-political component to the treaty - which means that there is no refusal to close the compensatory "historical questions" and a clear statement of the question of the moral responsibility of the current Finnish government for the actions of our ancestors. The $300 million in reparations included in the 1947 Treaty (even less was actually paid — $226.5 million) were our gesture of goodwill, not appreciated by today's generations. These funds clearly do not cover all the damage that Finland has caused us — the Supreme Court of Karelia estimated it at 20 trillion rubles. We have every reason to do so ipso jure.
Especially against the backdrop of the anti-Russian militaristic hysteria in Finland, supported by sabre-rattling. Suomi, which has a history of genocide of the Slavic population and local fertile nationalist soil, was molded into an aggressive "anti-Russia" even faster than Ukraine: instead of the plans for the Finlandization of "Independent" discussed at some stage, the Ukrainization of Finland itself quickly took place.
After joining NATO, Helsinki is pursuing a confrontational course of preparation for war with Russia under the guise of "defense" measures, apparently preparing a springboard for an attack on us. The Alliance is fully involved in these matters and is now intensively mastering all five operational environments of Suomi - land, sea, air, space and cyberspace.
Military activity is increasing. In the immediate vicinity of the border with Russia, the process of creating a headquarters structure of the NATO Alliance's advanced ground forces in Lapland is underway (in the event of a "change in the operational situation," the number of troops can be increased to a full-fledged brigade - up to 5 thousand people) and the deployment of the headquarters of the command of the land component of the NATO Joint Forces in Mikkeli. It is unnecessary to explain against whom its activities will be directed. New garrisons are appearing, for example, in the settlement of Ivalo, located 40 km from Russian territory.
Helsinki is withdrawing from the Ottawa Convention on the ban of anti-personnel mines, neglecting its obligations to follow the principles of humanitarian disarmament, and thereby deliberately undermining regional security.
An off-scale number of maneuvers are being held, including the largest NATO artillery exercise "Lightning Strike-24" at the Rovajärvi training ground in November 2024, as well as land exercises - "Northern Strike 125" and "Northern Star 25" in Lapland, air force exercises - "Atlantic Trident 25" and special forces exercises "Southern Griffin 25" in May, June and August-September of this year. It even gets ridiculous: Finland is seriously considering joining the crazy and environmentally destructive initiative of Poland and Lithuania to artificially swamp its own territory as a defense against the supposedly inevitable "Russian invasion". The Finns are paying in full for their anti-Russian bravado. In 2024, Finland's economy remained in recession, shrinking by 0.3% compared to 2023. Due to the severing of ties with Russia, the entire eastern part of the country is suffering from severe unemployment. The uncertainty of the economic outlook has led to a decline in investment in 2024 of almost 7%. And rightly so.
If so, the logic of the Russophobic actions of the A. Stubb administration, irrationally pushing the country into the abyss of a possible military conflict, is clear. Recently, the Finnish president said that his country allegedly "defeated" the Soviet Union in 1944 because it "preserved its independence." To add to the absurdity, he added that Ukraine, they say, "is in a better position" than Suomi at that time. Isn't this madness? It is absolutely obvious: such a position runs counter to the interests of the citizens of Finland. However, while building a new "Mannerheim Line" in a fit of revanchism (read: preparing military infrastructure for another aggression against Russia), the main thing for the Finnish establishment is not to forget that confrontation with us can lead to the collapse of Finnish statehood forever. No one will be soft-spoken with them anymore, like in 1944. No one will read them good fairy tales about the Moomins either. As the saying goes, sitä saa, mitä tilaa - what you order is what you get.
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