Opinion Sur
The war in Ukraine has been and is as cruel as it is unnecessary. It highlights a geopolitical reality that both Russia and the West have refused to acknowledge. Sooner or later, it will end up without producing positive results anywhere. The call of the harsh reality is felt more strongly every day. There is a historical precedent that I present here, as the lesser of evils.
500,000 have already fallen between Russians and Ukrainians. Will they have to reach one million to be forced to stop a war that, although fair on the Ukrainian side, is still senseless?
Mr. Putin’s strategic mistake has exposed the brutality of his regime (heir to a long tradition of his country), but it has also been a test bed for the weapons of the West, at the expense of a courageous people, who in the end will not be able to “defeat” an incompetent but always powerful enemy. Sooner or later, both combatants will arrive to “freeze” their campaigns and sign an armistice that will hopefully remain in time without leaving anyone satisfied.
As an example, and model of a possible scenario, in the last century (differences aside, especially in the respective national cultures), I have decided to translate and show the readers the text of a historical proclamation that few know, done by a Finnish national hero and supreme leader of defense of his country in the face of the Russian invasion. Here you have it, as an example of a great strategic vision.[1]
Marshal inspects the troops
Carl-Gustav Emil Mannerheim
Agenda
March 14, 1940
Soldiers of the glorious Finnish army
Peace between our country and Soviet Russia has concluded – a cruel peace, which has granted the Soviet Union virtually every battlefield on which you have shed your blood for the sake of all that we cherish and hold sacred.
You did not want this war. You loved peace, work, and progress. In spite of this, this struggle was imposed on you, and in its course, you have achieved great things, which will shine in the pages of history for centuries to come.
More than 15,000 of those among you who joined this war will never see their homes again, and many others have been disabled for the rest of their lives. But you have struck hard, and if some two hundred thousand enemies are now buried under the snow or look at the starry sky with their dead eyes, the fault is not yours. You have only followed the cruel law of war: kill or die.
Soldiers!
I have fought on many battlefields, but I have never seen soldiers like you. I am as proud as if you were my own children – proud of the men of the northern tundra, of the children of the wide spaces of Ostrobothnia, of the jungles of Karelia, of the smiling landscape of Savolax, of the rich farms of Tavaastland and Satakunta, of the grasslands of Nyland and of Finland itself, with its whispering birches. And I am equally proud of a factory worker and the son of a farmer, as well as of the comfortable man, who risked their limbs and their lives.
I thank you all: officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers. I especially salute the reserve officers for their selfless courage, sense of duty and skill with which they have exercised a profession that was not their own. They, too, paid proportionately the highest price of the war, but they did so with joy and never departing from duty.
I thank the staff officers for their tireless work, and finally I thank my closest collaborators: the chief of general staff and the general boatswain, the commanders and chiefs of divisions and army corps, who often made the impossible possible.
I thank the Finnish Army and all its branches who, nobly competing with each other, have achieved splendid feats since the first day of the war. I thank them for the boldness with which they attacked an enemy superior in numbers and equipped at times with weapons new to them, and for the tenacity with which they have defended every inch of our homeland. The destruction of more than 1,500 Russian tanks and more than 700 aircraft bear witness to heroic acts, often by single individuals.
I acknowledge the volunteer defense service of the women of Finland and their contribution to the war effort, with pride and gratitude – their spirit of sacrifice and their tireless work in different areas of activity, which allowed men to go to the front lines. Their nobility of spirit has fully earned the gratitude and recognition of the army.
A place of honor belongs to the thousands of workers who faithfully and in many cases voluntarily, defying air attacks, stood at the foot of the machines building material for the use of the army in this dark period of the war – and also to all those who tirelessly entrenched the fortifications under enemy fire. On behalf of our home country, I thank you all.
Despite this courage and sacrifice, the Government has been forced to conclude a peace in very harsh terms, a peace that nevertheless deserves an explanation.
Our army was small; our forces and reserves insufficient. We were ill-equipped to face a great power. While our brave soldiers defended the borders, we had to bring supplies where they were lacking, with superhuman effort. We had to erect defensive lines where they did not exist before, and we had to wait for help that did not arrive. We had to find weapons and equipment – and this at a time when every country was feverishly arming itself to face the storm that is now sweeping the world. Your feat won the admiration of the world, but after three and a half months of struggle, we were practically alone. We did not succeed in securing external assistance at the front, except for two battalions reinforced with artillery and air cover, and this on a war front in which our men had to face day and night without rest, new enemy formations, beyond the physical and mental limit, without succumbing.
When the history of this war is written, the world will remember your heroism.
This heroic resistance in the face of countless guns, tanks, and planes against us would not have been possible without the generous help of Sweden and the West. Unfortunately, the magnanimous offer of military aid from theWest has not been able to materialize because our neighbors, fearing their own security, have refused to allow troops to transit through their territory.
After 16 weeks of bloody fighting, without rest day or night, our army stands undefeated in the face of an enemy that, despite enormous losses, has grown considerably in number. Our home front, where countless air strikes have terrorized women and children, has not relented. Our burned cities and destroyed villages far away from the front lines to our western borders bear witness to the deprivation our people have suffered in these past months.
Our fate is cruel because we are forced to surrender ground to a strange race with a philosophy of life different from our own and with other moral values – a ground that for centuries we have cultivated with the sweat of our brow.
However, within the country that still remains, we will make every effort to give a home to the homeless and to provide a better life for all, and we will be as before prepared to defend our undivided homeland.
We are proud to know that we have a historic mission – a mission we will continue to honor – to defend Western civilization, which has been our heritage of centuries; but we also know that we have paid every penny of our debt to the West!
[1] By the Treaty of Moscow (March 12, 1944) Finland had to cede 2 areas of its territory (Karelia and Salla) to the USSR. Then, by the Treaty of Paris (February 2, 1947) it surrendered even more: 45,792 square km. The respective assignments range from 11 to 20 per cent of its territory.
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