Winter war tactics of fast and furious Finns

HISTORIANS and scholars scour memory to find an event in the past comparable to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and most come up with the invasion by Adolf Hitler of the Sudetenland followed by the whole of Czechoslovakia in 1938. But actually there are two precedents that contrast widely and we still do not know which will be followed here.

In 1940 the Nazi war machine was launched at France which threw up its hands, waved the white flag and surrendered in under three weeks. That was why the British Expeditionary Force had no choice but to race for the coast and by a miracle be rescued from Dunkirk. But, as the Daily Express detailed yesterday, there was another short war which most have erased from memory.

In 1919, with Russia wracked by civil war, the Finns, for a century their colony, seized the moment, snatched their independence and declared the Republic of Finland. Lenin could do nothing but 20 years later Stalin took revenge and invaded Finland. The fashionable view in the West was: “Poor little Finland, not a chance.”

But the smartypants were wrong. The Finns, under the leadership of Marshal Mannerheim, fought back with ferocity and skill.

It was called the Winter War. They fought as partisans from out of the snowcovered wilderness of their limitless pine forests, gliding on skis, invisible in white snowsuits.

The Russian columns plunged along the roads, hub-deep in snow, often bogged down. The Finns swept out of the pines to carry out ambush after ambush from the sides and behind. Red Army casualties climbed and climbed, their morale sank and sank. Eventually they could take no more,

abandoned their snowed-in trucks, guns and tanks, and fled back to the border. Finland had to give up some territory, but it has been independent and free ever since.

Which could happen in Ukraine? The short answer is – either. We do not know yet. But this fight could be far from over. Not as big as Russia, Ukraine is nevertheless a huge expanse of country.

As the Russian columns advance their lines of communication get

ever longer, and every mile harder to protect against partisans sweeping out of the landscape to strike.

If they elect to fight like the Finns it could be Vladimir Putin has not yet even begun to recognise his possible casualties.

Under Stalin the Russian people could be kept ignorant of what was going on. Not today. Every last detail is being photographed from space, and made available on the internet. The Russians in their

homes can see it all.Their dictators may not like it but they cannot stop it. So… a French-style collapse or a Finnish-style fightback?

So far we see the fleeing women and children but it could be that Russian casualties have not really begun yet. And when they do? The Russian generals? Their young generation? The crashing economy? The tidal wave of coffins?

We will know all within a month, but not before.