Can Ukraine Draw Lessons from Finland’s Winter War Against Russia?
The Soviets ended up winning the Winter War, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for Moscow.
U.S. secretary of defense Pete Hegseth’s recent controversial statement that Ukraine’s “borders won’t be rolled back to what everybody would like them to be in 2014” has caused much consternation for Ukraine and its supporters. Many are calling it a betrayal, with some pundits going so far as to equate the secretary’s pronouncements with then-British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous “Peace in our time” speech back in 1938.
That comparison is unrealistic. In sharp contrast with Chamberlain meekly conceding then-Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler without firing a shot, the Ukrainians have spent the past three years inflicting massive casualties on the Russian invaders—on land, sea, and in the air—and thus causing utter humiliation for Vladimir Putin. Therefore, if Hegseth and U.S. president Donald Trump were to somehow convince Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to concede some small percentage of captured land to Russia, it wouldn’t so much be a Munich-style concession as it would be a Pyrrhic victory for Russia—much like the Soviets’ so-called Winter War against Finland of 1939-1940.
What is a Pyrrhic victory?
Merriam-Webster defines “pyrrhic victory” as “a victory that comes at a great cost, perhaps making the ordeal to win not worth it.” It relates to Pyrrhus, a king of Epirus who defeated the Romans in 279 BCE but lost many of his troops.
After two such victories against the Romans, King Pyrrhus is reported to have said something along the lines of (roughly paraphrasing here) “Another such victory and we are lost!”
The Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolutionary War is a classic example of a Pyrrhic victory: the British achieved their military objective during the engagement but took a severe mauling at the hands of the Americans.
Pyrrhic victory exemplified: The Winter War of 1939-1940
The Winter War began on November 30, 1939 (three months after the beginning of World War II) with the Soviet invasion of Finland, and lasted until March 13, 1940. The Soviet Union initiated the war by invading Finland, and the League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from its organization.
Technically, the Soviets ended up winning the war, as the Finns eventually sued for peace and ceded their eastern province of Karelia to Joseph Stalin, but it was very much a Pyrrhic victory for Moscow. Somewhere between 50,000-150,000 Soviet troops were killed in action, compared with 25,000 for the Finns. And needless to say, eighty-five years later, Finland is very much still a free and independent country, and—much to Putin’s consternation—is now a NATO member to boot.
The Winter War and the “White Death”
The most famous (or infamous, if you have pro-Russian sympathies) single cause of the Red Army’s horrific casualties was Simo Häyhä, aka “The White Death,” the deadliest sniper in the history of warfare. Alikersantti (Corporal) Häyhä killed a whopping 542 Red Army soldiers over a mere ninety-eight-day span before being knocked out of the war and severely disfigured on March 6, 1940, by a Red Army soldier’s explosive bullet that hit Simo in his lower left jaw. He was mustered out of the Finnish Army on August 28, 1940, and was awarded an officer’s commission as a going-away present, with a final rank of Vänrikki (Second Lieutenant).
What makes Häyhä’s kill tally all the more remarkable is that he scored all of those kills with his rifle’s factory iron sights; he didn’t use a scope as he felt this required him to raise his head too high, increasing the chances of him getting spotted and killed.
What’s more, there’s a certain irony in his weapon of choice: a Finnish version of the Russian-designed Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle chambered in 7.62x54mmR cartridge (the longest serving military cartridge in history), which ironically was also the gun and caliber combo used by the Red Army’s most famous snipers of the so-called “Great Patriotic War”: Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the highest-scoring female sniper in recorded history with 309 confirmed kills, and Vasily Zaitsev, who killed 225 enemy soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad and was immortalized for Hollywood audiences in the 2001film “Enemy at the Gates. The rifle had a magazine with five rounds and delivered those rounds with a muzzle velocity of 2,800 ft (853 meters) per second at an average effective range of about 1,800 ft (548 meters). (Speaking as a former Mosin-Nagant owner, I can personally vouch for the Mosin’s accuracy and mule-kicking power.)
(Perhaps one can draw at least a loose analogy between Finnish soldiers killing Red Army troops with Russian rifles back then and Ukrainian soldiers killing Russian troops with Soviet-designed AK rifles and Makarov pistols in the present day.)
A Way Forward?
Thus far, there is no individual real-life Ukrainian troop who has earned the type of deadly laurels that Häyhä did; after all, the so-called “Ghost of Kyiv” turned out to be apocryphal. That said, Ukraine has produced many heroes in this war during the last three years, from the brash, defiant defenders of Snake Island to that Ukrainian Air Force F-16 fighter pilot who shot down six Russian cruise missiles in a single sortie. And just like present-day Finns can take pride in the bloody nose they gave to the Soviets in the latter’s Pyrrhic victory, future Ukrainians would be able to take equal pride in the bloody nose they inflicted in a post-Soviet Russian Pyrrhic victory.
Perhaps Zelenskyy can draw some kind of lesson from the Finns when contemplating how to resolve the contentious disputes over Crimea and the Donbas, especially if his country can be given some kind of ironclad security guarantees by the United States and NATO, even if short of outright NATO membership?
And in that hypothetical situation, Putin would have to contemplate this conundrum: considering just how much manpower and materiel Russia lost against a supposedly outmatched adversary like Ukraine, just how much worse would the Russian military fare against the United States (especially in tandem with America’s NATO allies)?
About the Author: Christian D. Orr
Christian D. Orr was previously a Senior Defense Editor for National Security Journal (NSJ) and 19FortyFive. He is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch, The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security, and Simple Flying. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS). If you’d like to pick his brain further, you can ofttimes find him at the Old Virginia Tobacco Company (OVTC) lounge in Manassas, Virginia, partaking of fine stogies and good quality human camaraderie.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
