History is full of parallels.
Trying to use them to predict the future is a fool’s errand. It almost never works. .
Almost.
But huimans instinctively seek out patterns; it’s evolved into our brain; it’s a survival mechanism. We see things that belong together. We find Waldo.
And the historically parallels with Finland’s 1940 “Winter War” (Talvesota) against the USSR are hard to ignore.
One Finnish historian runs down the comparisons in this long, but utterly worth-reading, Twitter thread:
No one disputes that Russia dwarfs Ukraine’s military — just as the Soviet forces dwarfed Finland’s in 1939. In 2020, Russia spent ten times more on its military than Ukraine did.
Nonetheless, historian William Farley recently wrote, “the Winter War offers a hopeful lesson for Ukraine, in that it is possible for a smaller country to badly bloody Russia’s nose.”
Robert Service, a veteran historian of Russia at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told the Wall Street Journal’s Tunku Varadarajan that he thinks the Ukrainians could well lose the war eventually. But he finds it inconceivable that they will accept subjugation. “The Ukrainians have become more nationally conscious over the 20th century, and they’re a proud people who’ve seen what happened to them when they were subjugated by the U.S.S.R.,” he noted. “They had it in the early 1930s, when millions died under Stalin’s famines. They had it again in the late 1940s, after the war ended. I don’t think they’re going to let history repeat itself.”
Finland had one advantage the Ukrainians don’t – most of its frontier with Russia was dense, wooded Taiga, broken up by swampty motti that made movement of any kind difficult.
Ukraine? It’s got distance – some, anyway – and cities, which favor the defender in other ways – ways that Russia isn’t above solving with high explosives, which have their own political and military disadvantages.
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