Last week I made a fact-finding trip to the Russian-Finnish border in the Leningrad Region to have a word with local officials and our border guards. Cross-border traffic is frozen, while just recently the checkpoints bustled with activity. At Helsinki’s initiative, normal and mutually beneficial relations that had taken decades to build have been ruined. Suomi’s ordinary people are the hardest-hit. They used to enjoy hefty benefits from thriving bilateral trading and economic relations, and quite naturally these days many do not hesitate to express their anger about the stupid policies that the Finnish authorities are pursuing to the detriment of their interests.
I would like to say a few words about the root causes of this situation. Regrettably, it is not accidental. The whirlwinds of turbulent geopolitical processes merely strip naked old-time problems, exposing their true essence. This is precisely what happened in Finland’s case.
Any trip to our northwestern regions at the beginning of the autumn season invariably serves as a good occasion to recall the most tragic date in the history of the great Russian city on the Neva River – the Nazi blockade during World War II, which began on September 8, 1941. However, it seems that today we are the only ones whose memories of those dark days are still fresh. The direct culprits of those events have been trying to painstakingly erase the traces of their atrocities from historical memory. Or at least to ensure there should be no "undesirable" parallels with their current policies. I am referring not only to Germany, which even at the official level blasphemously refuses to recognize the blockade of Leningrad as a crime against humanity.
One should never forget that without the involvement of the Finnish armed forces, the blockade of Leningrad, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, could not have happened. Obsessed with a thirst for a revanche and determined to reverse the outcome of the Soviet-Finnish confrontation of 1939-1940, the leadership of Suomi recklessly plunged into the crucible of war on the side of Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941. Ultra-nationalist propaganda narratives reigned in Finnish society at the time, and with the approval of their Nazi patrons the powers that be in Helsinki contemplated the idea of Finnlands Lebensraum – "living space for Finland" in full seriousness. The country’s military-political authorities intended not only to lay hands again on the territories that had been transferred to the USSR under the Moscow Peace Treaty of March 12, 1940, but also to reach what they described as the "natural borders of Greater Finland," stretching from the Gulf of Finland to the Barents Sea, including Eastern Karelia, Leningrad and its environs, and the Kola Peninsula. As well as to rid these lands of the presence of so much hated Russians. In their boldest fantasies some hoped to advance beyond the Urals to the Ob River. Such territorial greed (in percentage terms relative to the country's actual area) was the strongest in Europe at that time. These ambitions surpassed even the claims to neighboring states made by "fellow members" of the Nazi-led bloc - Italy, Romania and Hungary.
Helsinki’s aggressive designs aligned closely with the objectives of Nazi Germany, which actively supported Finnish territorial expansion. A June 25, 1941 cable message from the Finnish envoy to Berlin, Toivo Kivimäki, narrated in very clear terms the contents of his conversation with Hermann Göring, who assured him that Finland would gain "from Russia territorially, and with a surplus, everything it wants." The general staffs of the Finnish Army and the Wehrmacht coordinated plans for a joint invasion of the Soviet Union, with troop interactions during the Leningrad offensive developed in accordance with Operation Barbarossa. The shared purpose – the fight against Bolshevism – alongside the rhetoric emphasizing the military alliance between the Finns and the Germans, was explicitly reflected in Finnish Commander-in-Chief Carl Mannerheim’s order dated July 10, 1941. The availability of Finland’s mobilization resources for an attack on the northwestern USSR enabled the Nazi command to free up divisions for other strategic areas. In other words, the responsibility for the tragic consequences of this alliance – the shattered lives and destinies of millions of innocent Soviet men, women and children, who had no time to be evacuated from the country’s West to heartland areas away from the battlefields (in particular, during the first weeks of the Wehrmacht’s rapid advance) - rests squarely on the Finnish authorities of that period, who facilitated this bloody partnership with the Third Reich.
The Finnish forces displayed notable ferocity. The initial Luftwaffe air raids on Leningrad in summer 1941, repelled by Soviet air defenses, were carried out from Finnish airfields, as German aircraft in East Prussia were too far away, unable to reach the city without landing for refueling. Finnish troops approached the Svir River by mid-September 1941, capturing and destroying the Upper Svir Hydroelectric Plant (then still under construction), intended to better Leningrad’s power supply. They also cut the Kirov Railway, a major traffic artery crucial to bringing essential supplies to the city. The forces of occupation were keen to upset the operation of the legendary Road of Life, an improvised route for trucks laid in wintertime across frozen Lake Ladoga. Squads of saboteurs were repeatedly sent with the aim to cut this critical lifeline.
On Lake Onega, Finnish forces operated a flotilla of gunboats, armored vessels, and high-speed barges, with their main base established in occupied Petrozavodsk (renamed Aanislinna by the Germans). Few remember that up to 1944 Finland’s access to the Barents Sea at the Pechenga (Petsamo) community allowed them to provide a strategically significant naval base in Liinakhamari to Nazi Germany’s Navy, the Kriegsmarine. From here, they facilitated the export of nickel from nearby deposits and carried out attacks against Arctic convoys delivering Lend-Lease supplies to the USSR. Do the British, who lay flowers at memorials to Arctic convoys’ participants in Scotland, or Americans at similar sites in Maine, know that their heroic fellow countrymen’s efforts were compromised, in part, through the fault of their current Finnish allies in NATO? The question remains open.
Finnish forces’ participation in artillery bombardments of Leningrad is common knowledge. While some claims suggest a "noble ban" by Mannerheim on strikes against Leningrad – the city where he spent his younger days - reliable historical evidence refutes this. Such shellings, including indiscriminate ones harming civilian population did occur in reality. Kronstadt was one of the targets. Their limited scope was due to the small number of Finnish artillery pieces and gunners’ poor combat training, but by no means their commanders’ sentimentality or mercy. Notably, in early 1944, as the blockade was about to be broken, the Finnish Air Force conducted very aggressive attacks on Soviet airfields near Leningrad’s northern suburbs, such as Kasimovo and Levashovo. Several dozen bombers were sent out in April of that year, but Soviet air defenses thwarted their efforts, forcing them to retreat to the Joensuu airfield achieving nothing. Throughout the summer of 1944, Finnish troops maintained military pressure on Leningrad from the north, even after the Germans in January were rolled back south and southwest away from the city.
Finland committed acts of genocide and war crimes against the civilian population of the USSR not in Leningrad alone. Suomi’s death squads reaped the main bloody harvest in Karelia. Today, the descendants of the Nazi’s Finnish henchmen speak about this sparingly, reluctantly and with annoyance.
To put it in a nutshell. Such statements are another blatant attempt to rewrite history. In passing, to justify the territorial claims of the Mannerheim regime, which extended far to the east of the Soviet-Finnish border of 1939. And to erase memories the exceptional cruelty of the Finnish administration of occupation during the war. The hard facts testify: the invaders, who formed the Military Administration of Eastern Karelia headed by Colonel Vaino Kotilainen (starting from 1943 by Olli Paloheimo), pursued an overtly racist policy. They did everything they could in attempts to make Karelia part of Finland without the "Slavic component". They segregated the peoples into "correct" - Finno-Ugric - and "incorrect" - mainly, meaning ethnic Russians. The former were supposed to be left as citizens of a future Greater Suomi and forcibly "Finlandized" – which implied erasing their historical and cultural identity and eliminating any bonds with the common Russian civilizational space. The other group – the "non-native population" – was 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, similar to the yellow Star of David introduced by the Nazis as an identification mark for European Jews. The life of the "non-natives" under the Finnish yoke differed little from the conditions of the population in the territories of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republics occupied by the Germans. They were significantly disfranchised: received scarce food rations and stayed vulnerable to robberies by the Finnish military and extrajudicial persecution.
In addition, starting from the fall of 1941 to the summer of 1944, on the territory of the then Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic (in which 21 districts out of the 26 were completely occupied and one more occupied partially; so were 8 out of the 11 cities) a whole network of concentration camps and labor camps was deployed on Mannerheim’s orders. There are findings by the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders and Their Accomplices, which the Supreme Court of the Republic of Karelia used in its verdict of on August 1, 2024. According to these documents, the appalling sanitary and living conditions, the spread of infectious diseases, cold, lack of food, and the forced use of slave labor of women, the elderly, and children resulted in the death of 8,000 civilians and more than 18,000 prisoners of war. Unlike the Nazis, the Finns did not even need gas chambers or mass executions.
Today, many Finnish historians awkwardly juggle with facts, embarrassingly hinting that concentration camps were created, allegedly, not for the "annihilation of Soviet population," but for the "detention of persons resettled for military reasons or suspected of political unreliability." An attempt to shift the emphasis from the Finnish authorities’ genocide of the Slavic population during the war to something "neutral" just exposes the extremist and nationalist essence of their policy - an exact replica of the Nazi one. But facts are stubborn things. The number of prisoners in such concentration camps reached 20% of the entire population under the regime of occupation – these are extremely large figures even by the standards of the Second World War. It is difficult to imagine what a hysterical outcry would have begun in Europe, if someone had come up with the idea of justifying the creation of, for example, the infamous Dachau concentration camp, which was originally created specifically for opponents of the Nazi regime. Meanwhile, the Finns who indulge in Russophobic and, in fact, cannibalistic rhetoric, get away with everything.
Even before the end of the Vyborg-Petrozavodsk strategic offensive operation (June 10 - August 9, 1944), the Deputy Chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, Lieutenant-General Iosif Shikin, was dispatched to the Karelian Front to collect evidence on crimes committed by the Finnish troops. In a report addressed to the 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 Alexander Shcherbakov, dated July 28, 1944, he indicated that the collected evidence "testifies to the wild, barbaric torture and torment that Finnish sadists subjected their victims to before killing them." The evidence found made even seasoned frontline soldiers shudder. In several photographs collected at various combat contact areas and confirmed by captured Finns’ testimonies, Finnish army officers 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 desks or sent them as gifts to relatives.
The losses inflicted on Karelia’s economy was enormous. More than 80 villages were razed to the ground and about four hundred others heavily damaged. A report describing the atrocities of the Finnish-fascist invaders, published in the daily Pravda on August 18, 1944, reads: in Petrozavodsk alone, the university, public library, philharmonic society, children’s extra-curricular activity center, five schools, nine childcare centers, and a cinema were plundered and then burned. All bridges and over 485 residential buildings, including the house once used by Russian 18th century poetry classic Gavrila Derzhavin were destroyed. In the occupied areas of the Karelo-Finnish SSR, the invaders destroyed all mechanized enterprises and logging and timber rafting facilities. The invaders caused enormous destruction to the facilities of the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal. In general, Soviet Karelia was mercilessly robbed: 4 million cubic meters of timber and timber products, 1 million volumes of library books were taken to Suomi, and livestock was stolen. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Finns’s actions differed little from the implementation of the cannibalistic programs of Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe - the Generalplan Ost and the Backe Plan (also known as The Hunger Plan).
Why then were the Finnish criminals, unlike the Nazis, not punished the way they deserved for their crimes? It was thanks to the political will of the USSR that the military-political authorities of Finland did not end up in the dock in Nuremberg, and the trials of a number of senior functionaries took place in Suomi itself. The sentences were rather lax. Unlike those who stood similar trials in Germany and Japan, none of the accused who deserved the capital punishment were executed. After some time, the convicts were pardoned altogether.
After the war Finland preferred to pursue a balanced policy based on the principles of military non-alignment, for which reason the issue of Finnish crimes was not raised between us. The USSR sincerely believed in the need for a good-neighborly policy in the name of turning the Baltic Sea into an area of cooperation. It perceived the events of 1941-1944 as a tragedy that should not be used to build unnecessary dividing lines. The authorities in Helsinki supported this course, aware that on the map of Europe their country exists within its borders largely by virtue of the good will of the anti-Hitler coalition, which issued a kind of political pardon certificate to the Finns.
Mutually beneficial economic cooperation was established - Finland was receiving raw materials, investment and petrochemical products on a stable basis, and in return supplied the USSR with high-tech equipment that could not be obtained directly in the West. There were a number of joint ventures in various fields - shipbuilding, metallurgy, energy.
Alas, these days, due to the "efforts" of the pro-American puppet authorities of the Land of a Thousand Lakes, bilateral relations have collapsed and Helsinki alone is to blame for the insane logic of sanctions. The trade volume for 2024 was only 1.26 billion euros (in contrast to this, in 2019, the trade turnover reached 13.5 billion US dollars). So why should Russia cover up the dark pages of the Finnish past?
The more so, since, criminal liability for genocide and war crimes does not imply the application of the statute of limitations, and the time when the crimes occurred does not affect their classification as crimes against humanity. In particular, as follows from UN General Assembly Resolution 96 (I) of 1946, 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 General Lothar 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 Jeremy Sarkin points out in his fundamental work entitled Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the 21st Century, claims can be filed in a national or international court, which can apply the principles of international law and/or public and private law. In general, international law is on the side of the victims. The very instance of crimes of this kind is much more important than how much time has elapsed since the moment 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. It is noteworthy that the Finns reluctantly deigned to remove the Nazi emblem from the flags of their units as part of the reform of the flags only in August 2025, citing "external pressures" The ideological heirs of the Finnish-fascist invaders themselves constantly give grounds for making claims against them. After joining the NATO bloc, which calls Russia its enemy, Finland these days 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 (Russia never gave its official, explicit consent to Suomi’s unilateral termination of commitment to its defense clauses in 1990), as well as the bilateral Treaty on the Basic Principles of Relations of 1992. This concerns Finland’s pledge not to use armed forces outside its territory, which clearly contradicts the global militaristic inclinations of NATO members. Interaction with NATO as such 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 today are preparing to suicidally violate. On the eve of the Great Patriotic War, Finland willingly provided its land to the Third Reich for the deployment of the Wehrmacht’s infrastructure for an attack on the USSR. Today it servilely opens it to NATO members for military development, while simultaneously pointing at us as the "main threat to its security." In particular, under the agreement on cooperation in the field of defense with the United States (approved by the Parliament of Suomi 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 the legal point of view, the rupture of the synallagmatic connection inherent in treaties – the mutual conditionality of performance by both parties – highlights 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 a Helsinki-friendly language, this rule stipulates that an international agreement is not a political a la carte menu, where items are selected individually, but rather a combo meal.
In other words, if there is no military-political component of the treaty – this means that we are relieved of the compensatory obligation to let bygones be bygones, close "historical issues" and avoid throwing a spotlight on the question of the moral responsibility of the current Finnish government for the actions of its ancestors. The 300 million US dollars of reparations included in the 1947 Treaty (in fact, far less – 226.5 million US dollars – was actually paid) were our gesture of goodwill, not appreciated by today's generations. These funds clearly do not cover all the damage that Finland inflicted on us – the Supreme Court of Karelia estimated it at 20 trillion rubles. We have every reason to do so ipso jure.
This is especially so against the backdrop of the anti-Russian warmongering hysteria in combination with saber-rattling afoot in Finland. Suomi, whose history is marred with genocide of the Slavic population, and with its fertile soil for nationalist sentiment, was molded into an aggressive "antagonist of Russia" even faster than Ukraine: instead of the plans for the Finlandization of Ukraine, discussed at some stage, the Ukrainization of Finland happened virtually in no time.
After joining NATO, Helsinki, under the guise of "defense" measures, has been pursuing a confrontational course of preparations for war with Russia, apparently creating a springboard for an attack on us. The Alliance is fully involved in these affairs and is now intensively establishing its presence in all five operational environments of Suomi - land, sea, air, space and cyberspace.
Military activity is booming. In the immediate vicinity of the border with Russia, the processes of creating a headquarters structure of the advanced ground forces of the NATO alliance in Lapland are 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 5,000 men) and the deployment of the headquarters of the NATO Northern Land Component Command (MCLCC) in the city of Mikkeli is in progress. It is redundant to explain against whom its activities will be directed. New garrisons are cropping up, for example, in the community of Ivalo, located 40 km from Russian territory.
Helsinki is withdrawing from the Ottawa Convention on the ban of anti-personnel mines, thereby discarding its obligations to follow the principles of humanitarian disarmament and 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. Some moves being contemplated look truly ridiculous: Finland is seriously considering joining the crazy and environmentally destructive initiative of Poland and Lithuania to artificially swamp its own territory as a means of defense against an allegedly 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 led to a slump in investment in 2024 by almost 7%. It serves them right.
If so, the Russophobic logic of the Alexander Stubb administration, which is insanely pushing the country into the abyss of a possible military conflict, is pretty clear. Just recently, the Finnish president said that his country allegedly "defeated" the Soviet Union in 1944 because it "retained its independence." To add to the absurdity, he remarked that Ukraine, supposedly, "is in a better position" than Suomi was at that time. Isn't this crazy? It is more than obvious: such a position runs contrary to the interests of Finland’s people.
However, while building a "new Mannerheim Line" in a fit of revanchism (in other words, preparing military infrastructure for another aggression against Russia), the main thing for the Finnish establishment is not to forget that confrontation with us could lead to the collapse of Finnish statehood once and for all. No one will be soft-hearted as in 1944 with them anymore. Nor will anyone care to read them good bed-time fairy tales about the Moomins. As the saying goes, sitä saa, mitä tilaa - you get what you order.