Vantage Point North

White Guards at Lemi In January 1918 Finland was in turmoil. While the nation had mostly avoided the horrors of the Great War and successfully declared itself independent in December of 1917, the population was divided between socialists and the rest, the Reds and the Whites. After mid January both the Red Guards and the Suojeluskunta, also known as White Guards, began to clash, especially in Karelia. The Imperial Russian army was still occupying Finland and the White Guards managed to disarm the passive Russian forces in Sortavala, Antrea and Joensuu. On the 26th the socialist Red Guards begun an open revolution. In January 26th the Suojeluskunta Battalion from Viipuri, that had regrouped at Venäjänsaari after communists took over the city, began to march, mostly on skis, towards the railway stations at Kämärä and Säiniö in order to disrupt the vital railway line between Petrograd and Vyborg. The battalion had roughly 500 white guards and its forward elements managed to capt

Kurganets-25 prototype The Russian army has three different types of motorized infantry formations. The new and experimental light ones ride on 4x4 MRAPs and Pickup-trucks. The wheeled ones are now mostly equipped with BTR-82A 8x8 IFV:s, while the tracked ones have more varied equipment including the BMP-2, BMP-3, BMP-4 and MT-LB. The tracked platforms were supposed to be replaced with the new Armata family vehicles the heavy T-15 and the lighter Kurganets-25. Both the T-15 and Kurganets-25 have had serious development delays and the Kurganets-project has on several occasions been labeled as abandoned. While the new vehicles are troublesome, their turret development seems to have been more successful. T-15 with the 57mm AU-220 turret The “Epoch” turret, that was developed for the Kurganets-25 has been up-gunned with a medium velocity 57mm gun. The resulting turret has been integrated with BMP-3 IFV and several of the new vehicles are entering service trials in the fi