Comments by "Seven Proxies" (@sevenproxies4255) on "Historical Comparison: Finland's Winter War vs Russian Invasion of Ukraine" video.

The Mannerheim strategy is something that most Scandinavian countries seek to employ as well. In terms of population, we're rather small countries. We don't have an inexhaustible amount of troops to defend with. So the doctrines focus on making it too expensive for a larger aggressor to occupy the countries. We're too few to stop them from coming in. So it's all about making their stay as fucking miserable and expensive as humanly possible, in order to make any occupation worth attempting.
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One stark difference would be the forests though. Finland is mostly covered in forests. Ukraine is very wide and open. The Ukrainians don't have the same kind of cover out in the wilds, forcing them to set up defensive positions inside towns and cities. Which naturally leads to a lot of collateral damage, because the Russians don't take any chances. If they suspect any building is harbouring Ukrainian resistance, they bombard it. During the Winter War, the Finns could just melt away in the forests, leaving very few targets for Russian heavy weapons to fire at.
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@grzegorzbrzeczyszykiewic3338 No, because the conflicts in Afghanistan are more recent than the Scandinavian and Finnish doctrines. Also, Afghanistan employed it with irregular forces. The Scandinavian and Finnish idea is using guerilla tactics with real armies that have access to an airforce, artillery and tanks.
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@griimae8022 The "pin point strike capacity" has been grossly exaggerated by the Russians. To many cities are flattened for "pin point strikes" to have taken place.
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@georgekaradov1274 Yeah, since there are forests around Kiev, defending becomes so much easier, especially against tanks. Tanks really like an open field. Infantry does not.
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@griimae8022 Mariupol?
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When I read about the winter war, what I learned was that the Finns did indeed demolish the russians, based on casualty rates. The problem is that the Russians would always have more to send, despite their losses. And once the Russians finally retreated, the Finns were at their wits end basically, having sustained too many losses of their own. Had Russia continued it's efforts for another 6 months or so, the Finns would most likely have been forced to surrender. So the timing for the Russian retreat couldn't have been better.
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@thesickrobot6924 I'd say it's the opposite. The Soviet armed forces went through so many political purges of it's upper echelons, because paranoid soviet dictators always feared that one of their generals might attempt a coup. The military of the Russian federation is definitely more modernized in comparison. A big part of the reason why the soviets lost the winter war was because Stalin had conducted some massive purges of officers that were deemed to be a threat to his authority just prior to the start of the winter war. So the soviet troops entering Finland did so with sub par left overs and bootlickers in terms of officers.
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@bosewicht2389 That's a likely assessment. Russia certainly do have guided munitions of their own making. And they do work. But the question is: in what numbers? The electronics will need semi-conductors. And since the entire world has seen a massive shortage of semi-conductors prior to the invasion into Ukraine, I doubt that the Russian ammo stores are that well stocked with guided munitions.
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@TheDoorspook11c Tanks have always been plagued by the issue of limited vision. They can't respond to threats as effectively in dense forest terrain or tight urban terrain. Open terrain is where they can use the long range capabilities of their armament to it's fullest. And it also prevents enemy infantry from hiding and taking cover as easily as they can in less open areas.
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@chuy3162 It's also a good way to ensure that your own civilians get slaughtered. As we see in Ukraine right now. Zelenskyy made the disastrous decision to basically hand out guns to any civilian who wanted them. People without training or military expertise. Now put yourself in the shoes of a russian soldier when he learns of how the Ukrainian government is arming civilians en masse. Will he check his targets or will he shoot at anything that moves with this knowledge at the back of his mind Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian government share some of the blame when it comes to civilian casualties because of this, due to their desperate acts of pressing civilians into service and arming civilians.
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@jkausti6737 Well to be fair, it's the same with a lot of militaries in the world. They possess a lot of cutting edge and high tech stuff, but the troops currently serving rarely get their hands on them. It's all mothballed in storage for whatever reason. So most troops make do with crap that was made 10-30 years ago.
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@vidard9863 It also means the invaders are far more likely to slaughter civilians en masse, because in that scenario they have no way of telling combatants from civilians. Literally everyone will be a potential combatant. And that's not an idea you want soldiers to have in their heads if the war drags on and they're feeling tired, hungry and frustrated.
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@thesickrobot6924 Yes, the Red Army did shape up quite a bit after Stalin was gone.
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@StressmanFIN That's the reality of being in the military. Everything you use as a soldier was made by the LOWEST bidder.
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@xcr75 The Russians are concerned about costs though. Their reasoning is rather that they can't afford to let Ukraine become a member of Nato, because the security risk it poses is too great for them to ignore. They're also counting on that whatever economic sanctions the west slaps Russia with will be nullified by trade deals with China, India and other non-western countries. Whether things will play out that the Kremlin hopes remains to be seen. Also, as for the Scandinavian countries and Finland, they'd pose a very difficult nut for Russia to crack if they entertained the idea of an invasion. Ukraine has a respectable amount of manpower, but the weaponry is not on par with the Scandinavian and Finnish arsenals. A big reason why Ukraine has been able to mount such a formidable resistance is owed in large part due to the fact that western countries are sending in modern weaponry to sabotage the Russian advance. I know Sweden is one of the countries that have contributed with anti-tank weapons that has been used.
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@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket If only there was a weapon that could be used to take out small flying objects... Oh there is. They're called shotguns.
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@vidard9863 No, that doesn't always happen. And frankly, a government that can't protect it's sovreignty without resorting to turning every civilian into a combatant is a government that has no right to exist to begin with. No government should ever be defended at "any cost".
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@vidard9863 Like what Zelenskyy is doing right now is using Ukrainian civilians as meatshields to protect himself with.
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@theutoid5663 I said it in another thread I think, a lot of armies "have" really cutting edge and high tech toys. But the crucial question is: in what numbers and what sort of distribution? See most countries put the carriage before the horse. They like to demonstrate their latest and most advanced inventions to the world to show how great they are and basically say "Yeah... Don't mess with us. We got this brand new superweapon developed". But at the end of the day, most of these latest and greatest superweapons tend to have low production numbers, and the actual equipment being issued to the troops to be used in present day is of an even lower number. This is true for Russia, but it's also true for the U.S, most Nato countries, all of the EU countries and China. It takes literal decades for a "new" piece of equipment or weapon to have been produced and distributed in numbers significant enough to be fielded for general purpose use.
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@emberfist8347 I'd say a tank is like a light, mobile pillbox in urban enviroments. It can serve as an armored strongpoint and cover for supporting infantry getting peltered by small arms fire. But it'll be taken out by man portabe anti-tank weapons, making the urban enviroment rather dangerous for tanks.
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@theutoid5663 Never try to make sense of the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of military logistics. One needs to be insane to understand it.
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@Covert_Arrangements Much respect to your service sir. It's nice to know that the marines study pragmatic examples from history.
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@drud3792 Did I say I think it's "okay" or desirable? No, I don't believe I did. I'm just describing reality, without passing moral judgements. You can't expect to always retain a moral highground in war.
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@xcr75 Russia did not "attack" in 2014. Crimea and Donbass have a majority ethnic Russian population who decided to secede from Ukraine, after the Euromaidan rebellion. The Euromaidan's goal was for all of Ukraine to join the EU. Which would put Ukraine in the hands of a western military alliance and on a straight path into Nato. The Separatists did not want to become a part of Nato, and so they broke out. They had support from Russia in terms of arms and equipment. But the separatists forces are still primarily composed of Ukrainian citizens with ethnic Russian origins.
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@TorianTammas I don't think you're as well versed in their means of production as you think you are. Just because imported components have been used in the past (because it was cheaper to import than to set up domestic production) it doesn't mean that they will be at their wits end because of sanctions. This is Russia we're talking about. Not some third world middle eastern shithole. They beat the west in the space race with the first successful satellite in orbit AND the first successful manned spaceflight. There's no shortage of electronic engineers in Russia. And they're setting up their domestic semiconductor manufacturing as we speak. You're not going to "stop" their production of tanks and missiles through sanctions anytime soon. And even IF they fail to create a domestic production chain (and that's a big IF), they can still import all the electronics they need from China, because China isn't playing ball with western sanction efforts whatsoever.
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The russians aren't too focused on a propaganda war in the west. They focus their propaganda at home. If you talk to Russian Putin supporters, they'll have you believe that Russian troops are getting landslide victories in Ukraine, where they cause no civilian casualties, and the Ukrainians are causing no Russian casualties whatsoever. Basically both sides are downplaying their losses, exaggerating their battle victories, and exaggerating the civilian deaths caused by the other side. So it's next to impossible to get a good overview of what is actually going on or who is actually winning or losing.
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@drud3792 Civilians also report that Russian soldiers were the one doing the handcuffing and the summary executions. The propaganda from both sides are turning the intelligence situation into a giant shitshow. It's impossible to know truth from fiction out of Ukraine right now if you only look at media reports and testimonies. I'm not saying I believe that the Ukrainian military are saints by any means (seen enough horrific shit out of Donbass since 2014 to believe that). What i'm saying is that there's no reliable reporting currently of what is going on in Ukraine now, and who is doing what.
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@johnmortin5603 So tanks don't like open fields of operations because anti-tank weapons exist... Any other genius and insightful conclusions from you?
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@vidard9863 Civilians always die to some degree in war, that's just the nature of war. But you know jack shit about military history if you think that every army in every war engaged in wholesale slaughter of civilians or violated women on sight. So it demonstrably makes a difference how the enemy troops view the civilians in how they behave towards them. But if you arm civilians and use civilians to attack enemy troops with, then enemy troops will always regard all civilians as hostiles. The job of a civilian is to get the hell out of the warzones and let the military forces fight. But you, being an unethical and dishonourable monster thinks it's better to force civilians to fight and paint giant targets on their inexperienced and militarily usless backs just to protect some oligarch presidents useless hide.
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@vidard9863 See the Vietnam war or the war in Iraq for examples and stop being ignorant. In the beginning of the Vietnam war, U.S troops were not running around committing atrocities. If they saw some vietnamese kids running around nearby, they viewed them as just harmless kids. But then the scumbags of the Vietcong started using children and women in their tactics, for example by using them as suicide bombers. Counting cynically on the american troops to not see the harm coming before it was too late. After a bunch of american troops had gotten killed by child suicide bombers, they stopped giving af and treated every civilian man, woman and child as a potential hostile, with massive civilian casualties as a result.
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@Schrodingers_kid Nah, not quite as much damage as possible. Putin is portraying himself as a "liberator" of Ukraine at home. Because he knows that most Russians have tangible sentiments and ties to Ukraine. The image of a liberator will be hard to sell if he has the troops flatten every single town and city on sight. It'll make him look like a butcher. And trust me, the Russians definitely have the means to turn every Ukrainian town or city to gravel. They are pulling their punches for a reason. They want to capture the cities first and foremost. But at the same time, Russian troops once in action, aren't very reliable. They look out for number one first, and will bend the rules and skirt orders if they feel it is safer for their own lives to do so.
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@johnmortin5603 It's not nearly as forested as Finland is.
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@PeterMuskrat6968 I've talked to plenty of Marines who would disagree about getting equipped with the good stuff. So they had to "make do" a lot of the time.
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@phunkracy Some of these people are not educated about warfare because they dismiss equipment as obsolete/useless because there are weapons that can take them out. By that logic all military equipment except nukes are useless, because nukes can take anything out. From entire tank brigades to Nimitz class Aircraft Carriers.
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@ldkbudda4176 Not wearing uniforms always makes you a criminal
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@PeterMuskrat6968 I don't really want to be in Nato though. What I want is an extensive nuclear weapons program in evey scandinavian country. Putin does not like the idea of getting nuked anymore than anybody else does. Being in Nato comes with too many obligations that does not sit well with our ideals of neutrality. With nukes you can still remain neutral.
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