First, the nation was a Nazi ally; then it turned a NATO stooge. The most recent allegation: It’s a reckless Russia-basher that deserves a ruthless response from the Kremlin. Who stated Finland was boring?
Amid all of the concentrate on Russia’s struggle towards Ukraine, it’s straightforward to miss one other prime goal of Moscow’s imperialist ire. Russia has lengthy used a skewed interpretation of historical past as a weapon to assault and delegitimize its neighbors—and, if the Kremlin’s newest rhetorical escalation is any information, it now has Finland in its gunsights. The Finns are understandably nervous, given latest precedent: In 2021, Russian chief Vladimir Putin’s prolonged historic essay denying Ukraine’s claims to statehood and decrying its independence from Russia supplied a pretext for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine a number of months later.
The small print may appear arcane: Who actually cares lately about Finland’s tangled historical past throughout World Struggle II, not to mention the authorized standing of the Grand Duchy of Finland inside the previous tsarist empire? However historical past shouldn’t be an educational self-discipline in Russia. It’s an instrument of energy, used to strengthen the Kremlin’s grip on society, legitimize aggression, and undermine different international locations’ sovereignty.
Moscow wields historical past with fiery emotion. Take, for instance, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who posted on X on Jan. 2 that the Bolsheviks’ recognition of Finnish independence from Russia in 1917 was a “blunder” (that presumably ought to now be reversed) and that the nation should pay for its “vile Russophobia.”
Painted by Western commentators as a liberal-minded modernizer throughout his 2008-12 stint as head of state, Medvedev has assumed the mantle of Russia’s chief Finland-basher. This time, the particular goal of his bile was “some man referred to as Stubb.” That was a derogatory reference to Finnish President Alexander Stubb, one of many savviest figures ever to have held excessive workplace in Finland. His English is flawless, and his golf is fairly useful, too, which has enabled him to strike up an unlikely however helpful friendship with U.S. President Donald Trump. Not like previous generations of Finnish leaders, he comes throughout as chatty, even extroverted.
The Finnish president’s New 12 months’s message, which prompted Medvedev’s tirade, would have struck most outsiders as anodyne. On Ukraine, Stubb stated—with understatement—that “we can’t be sure that Russia is prepared for peace,” warning Finns that any deal over Ukraine’s future could have components “that don’t align with our sense of justice.” He additionally insisted that Russia wouldn’t be allowed to proceed its aggression elsewhere: “Along with our allies, we’ll guarantee that Russia won’t ever once more assault certainly one of its neighbours.”
Stubb continued: “Our relationships with Russia have modified completely. What stays unchanged is that Russia is our neighbour. Each Finland and Europe intention to have functioning and peaceable relations with Russia. However, in the end, all of it is determined by Russia’s actions.”
Within the thin-skinned public discourse that prevails in Putin’s Russia, even a breath of criticism is handled as an insult. It provided an opportunity for Medvedev to renew the assaults that he launched final yr in a prolonged essay titled “The New Finnish Doctrine: Stupidity, Lies, Ingratitude.” Printed following a visit to the Russo-Finnish border in September, the textual content argued that the Finnish management’s newly hawkish stance had “ruined” good relations constructed up over many years. He cited wartime Finland’s “bloody partnership” with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, highlighted Finnish participation within the siege of Leningrad (during which extra 800,0000 civilians died), and accused postwar Finland of being ungrateful for its supposedly light therapy by the Kremlin.
By becoming a member of NATO in 2023, Medvedev wrote, the “pro-American puppet authorities” in Helsinki misplaced their proper to any “political pardon” from Moscow; Finland now “straight and rudely tramples” on the historic and authorized foundation for its existence as an impartial state. Russia, he argued, is subsequently entitled to surrender the treaties beneath which it acknowledged Finland’s independence, sovereignty, and borders; litigate prices of genocide and warmongering; and declare reparations from Helsinki for World Struggle II-era harm. All this, he wrote, “might result in the collapse of Finnish statehood as soon as and for all.”
The Russian context makes this rather more than Medvedev’s private bugbear. His efforts are a part of an even bigger marketing campaign to whip up anti-Finnish sentiment amongst Russians and to intimidate and demoralize Finns. Russian state TV ceaselessly options pundits and speak present hosts threatening Finland with conquest. The marketing campaign consists of bodily assaults on seabed infrastructure—most not too long ago within the type of an episode in late December during which the Fitburg, a cargo ship crusing beneath a Caribbean flag of comfort, broken an information cable linking Helsinki and the Estonian capital, Tallinn. A particular forces unit of the Finnish Border Guard boarded the vessel, which was beneath means with its anchor dragging alongside the seabed, and detained it. The Finnish authorities say they’re investigating the incident as attainable “aggravated legal harm, tried aggravated legal harm, and aggravated interference with telecommunications.”
Finns have responded firmly to those real-world incidents whereas downplaying the chance of a navy confrontation and quietly underlining their resilience and preparedness. They don’t want their nation to be seen as a geopolitical sizzling spot.
However observers in neighboring Sweden are much less inhibited. In a newly revealed examine for the Swedish Psychological Defence Company, Patrik Oksanen—one of many nation’s main specialists in Russian soiled methods—outlines the repeated historic smears and provocations directed towards Finland in 2025. He argues {that a} long-running marketing campaign to painting Finland as a Nazi collaborator intensified final yr by means of “orchestrated authorized actions, destruction of monuments, political statements and open threats.”
Once more, the parallels are worrying: Russian struggle propaganda has lengthy insisted that Ukraine is a hotbed of Hitlerite Nazism. Native courts and activist teams in neighboring areas of Russia, Oksanen writes, have been used “to supply a façade of legitimacy and grassroots help,” developing a “false juridical basis for potential reparations and even — in the long run — territorial claims” towards Finland.
Oksanen highlights the political backing that this marketing campaign receives from Putin on down. Putin’s advisor on “historic affairs,” former Russian Tradition Minister Vladimir Medinsky, performs a number one function. So too does Overseas Minister Sergey Lavrov, who not too long ago penned an introduction to a prolonged work of pseudo-history arguing that Lithuania’s statehood over the previous seven centuries is bogus. Three senior Russian lawmakers amplified Medvedev’s newest statements, claiming that Finland is a pseudo-state that’s stoking tensions with Russia, which could be pressured to take drastic measures in response—simply the type of language that preceded Russia’s assault on Ukraine. This confrontation entails Russia’s safety and intelligence providers, courts, the Overseas Ministry, prosecutors, politicians, authorities officers, assume tanks, Kremlin-aligned “activists,” media, Western shills, and nameless social media accounts.
Since Oksanen’s examine was revealed, Moscow upped the ante additional. On the Russian Overseas Ministry web site, there appeared a revised English-language version of the “Black E book,” a tendentious account of the supposedly endemic Russophobia in not simply Finland but additionally Sweden. The e book’s editor, Johan Bäckman, is a contract Finnish tutorial of Swedish heritage who has ceaselessly tussled with the authorities in Helsinki over his pro-Kremlin actions and been awarded honorary Russian citizenship.
Finnish officers dislike discussing these points publicly, for worry of drawing additional consideration to the Russian smears. The nation’s strategic tradition, honed throughout many years of uncomfortable neutrality throughout the Chilly Struggle, entails talking quietly, slowly, and barely on delicate subjects. However one of many nation’s main up to date historians, Henrik Meinander—whose new historical past of Helsinki can be revealed in English in February—described the Black E book to me as a “grotesque however unsurprising instance” of contemporary Russia’s “Stalinist historical past coverage.”
The assaults on Finland are a part of a a lot larger technique to weaponize Russia’s patriotic historiography, which depicts the Soviet Union as each innocent and heroic. It makes no point out of Joseph Stalin’s quasi-alliance with Hitler, the atrocities perpetrated by Soviet forces throughout Japanese and Central Europe, or the truth that Stalin launched a disastrous, unprovoked invasion of Finland within the Winter Struggle of 1939-40.
Finland beat again that assault, but it surely acquired solely modest help from allies and neighbors. It had to surrender substantial territory to strike the peace cope with the Soviets that ended the Winter Struggle in 1940. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Finland launched its personal offensive in try and regain its misplaced territories. It was a co-belligerent however not a proper ally of the Axis powers. It broke with Berlin in 1944 and concluded a separate peace with the Soviet Union, together with heavy reparations, territorial concessions, and compelled neutrality.
Russia’s black-and-white narrative concerning the “Nice Patriotic Struggle”—its title for World Struggle II—leaves no room for complexity or nuance. It adopts a easy, syllogistic argument: The Soviet Union fought and beat the Nazis. Due to this fact, anybody who attacked or resisted the Soviets, for any cause, is a heinous collaborator. Right this moment’s Russia claims all of this mantle, ignoring the function of non-Russians (notably Ukrainians and Belarusians) as each victims of and fighters towards the Nazis.
As a substitute, Moscow calls for unconditional, everlasting gratitude—and legitimizes countermeasures towards international locations that fail to show it. The consequence, Oksanen argues, is to make Russian fashionable imperial ambitions seem respectable and its opponents morally reprehensible. Briefly, Russia seeks to manage the previous with the intention to form the longer term.
Ought to we take Russia’s struggle over historical past significantly? Russia clearly does. It will possibly and does escalate its rhetorical struggle in scope and depth. It simply shifts from the knowledge battlefield to the authorized one, submitting lawsuits and issuing courtroom rulings towards Finland for struggle damages. Nonetheless spurious and unfair, these can then create the idea for sanctions. The marketing campaign also can embody actions equivalent to eradicating Finnish struggle memorials from previously Finnish battlefields that are actually in Russia, disrupting commemorative occasions at these websites, and harassing diplomats—all of which have occurred prior to now yr.
As the following degree of escalation, it isn’t troublesome to think about operations carried out on Finnish territory: nameless vandalizing of museums or monuments or Russian-orchestrated actions that might purport to point out that pro-Nazi, far-right components in Finland are on the rise. Nonetheless trivial and symbolic such stunts could seem, they harm the focused nation’s worldwide picture. In addition they unfold nervousness, worry, confusion, and polarization within the inhabitants. This is able to make two wins for Russia earlier than a single shot is fired.
