Vantage Point North

Reservists from KarPr training in the USA along with the US NG. These missions would still be voluntary. Finland is drafting a law that would allow the Finnish Defence Forces to order reservists abroad in case of a training or mission that significantly effects the Finnish security and is in the "local area". The Finnish reservists deployments abroad have been strictly voluntary since 1944, but with the NATO membership and reserve based fighting army, it was inevitable that there has to be a mechanism to send out fully functional formations as a military aid to our allies. Another important change is that the reservists would be able to give their consent for a mission and then such persons would be appointed to a fixed-term public-law employment relationship with the Defence Forces. This solves the issues of how the reservists should be reimbursed and also extends state "insurance" coverage for the missions. Law would also increase the max refresher training days ...

 On Friday 26.7.2024 the Finnish Ministry of Defense reported that a Russian vessel had violated the Finnish territorial waters on the eastern Gulf of Finland. The fact that this was reported by the MOD, instead of the Border Guard, that is under the command of the Ministry of Interior, indicated that the vessel in question had been a Russian state one.  Mikhail Kazansky Later on the same day it was confirmed that the vessel had been the Mikhail Kazansky , officially labelled as a hydrographic vessel in the Russian Baltic Fleet. Even a regular such boat has the sensors that can provide valuable intel for a navy that is planning hostile operations.  Project 23370G rendering The Mikhail Kazansky is a Russian Navy Project 23370G class multipurpose boat, it has the capability to transport teams into unprepared shores as well as deploy variety of buoys, officially navigation ones, but the same deployment system can be used for listening devices etc. The hull also off...

Turkish parliament ratified the Finnish NATO-membership yesterday. Before the process began, many pundits, myself included, expected Russia to try to interfere with the process.  This article is also available add-free in my Patreon . The wide scale destruction of the Russian army in Ukraine is an obvious reason that military force hasn't been used to tie down Finland into a frozen conflict to prevent its ascension to the alliance. In the current situation an attack against Finland would severely risk Finland seizing a buffer zone from Russia as Russia is unable to mass the required forces to overmatch the 300 000 men Finnish war time army. But the Russian commitment in to Ukraine doesn't explain the silence in the political and unconventional fields. Russia still has its intelligence services and illegal operatives. It seems that the Russian assessment of Finland is quite realistic at the moment. The sentiment within Finland is strongly against Russia and the Finnish public vo...

Finnish soldier in the Cold Response 2022 exercise in Norway. Photo: Emil Biese FDF Combat Camera Team The Finnish Defense Forces have been almost unique in Europe as their primary objective has always been to stop and beat back a Russian peer level attack. Unlike most other countries this priority remained even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, focus was placed on readiness and the ability to also counter smaller scale hybrid operations that can occur with very little warning. This has been achieved with the creation of readiness units that are manned by a mix of conscripts and professional soldiers.  The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has been very different than the 2014 one, with the whole operation opening up as large scale peer level war with all of the tools available in the Russian arsenal used. While this is exactly the premise Finnish defense is based on, the fact of a peer level warfare in Europe has caused the need t...

  Jehu-class boat and NH-90 helicopters. Photo: FDF The Finnish Defense Forces have been working hard with improving their readiness since 2014. The army has developed readiness units that are manned with conscripts serving 6 months of their 12-month conscription in a readiness role. The units are rather hard hitting, with usually a company of infantry augmented by organic artillery, anti-aircraft, and main battle tank detachments. While the Army readiness units have been operational for five years now, the first two Navy units reached operational status in December 2021. The unit is formed much in the same way as the army units, with a core of professional soldiers supported by the 12 month serving conscripts that make up the bulk of the unit. Navy readiness unit conducting CQB training. Note the blue version of the readiness unit patch.    Photo FDF What differentiates the Navy unit from their dry land counterparts, is their ability to be used also in internationa...

  Readiness battalion with their CV9030 (Photo: FDF) The Finnish Defense Forces have put an extra effort to increasing their readiness and capability to counter surprising threats after the Russian invasion of Crimea. This has been possible as the focus of the FDF has remained in the defense of the Finnish territory against the Russian threat and unlike the rest of the European armed forces it still maintains a reserve based army geared for high intensity warfare.   Note the environmentally friendly wooden bullets in use (Photo:FDF) Recent report from the Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI) suggests that Russia still has an edge over the NATO forces in Eastern Europe. The Russian forces have the advantage of better strategic mobility, faster chain of command and superior numbers in land combat. This disparity increases the risks of a military conflict in Northern Europe. The FOI estimates that the Finnish and Swedish effort in a fight against a Russian offensive in the ...

SRA competitor with a tst-class equipment (Photo by: Heli Soini) I’ve been shooting the Practical Shooting aka. IPSC for the past 15 years and unlike most of my peers, I haven’t competed in its Finnish cousin SRA or Sovellettu Reservilaisammunta, that is roughly translated as Applied Reservist Shooting. This weekend I finally managed to schedule the mandatory safety course for the SRA. But what actually is the SRA? To understand the sport, we have to first take a short hike across the Atlantic in to the USA, where Practical Shooting was formed. It’s, as the name implies, a shooting sport that focuses on the practical and efficient use of modern self-defense and law enforcement style firearms. The competitions consist of a number of stages that pit the shooter against a scenario with multiple targets. T he stage is timed with a shot timer and the targets are scored. The final result is a hit factor that is calculated by dividing the score with the time used. While t...

By the beginning of the March 1940 the Finnish leadership knew that the end was near. Both frontline troops and logistics were on the brink of a collapse. Standing alone against the Soviet giant was impossible without reinforcements and supplies from abroad. The massed assaults by tanks and infantry were preceded by artillery barrages on the scale of the WW1 western front that simply turned all defensive positions into gravel. A memorial service that was held on May 1940 for the 26 000 fallen Finns   The Soviet demands for a peace treaty were staggering. Finland was expected to hand over the homes of 400 000 of its citizens, including the second largest city Viipuri. The new border would also be much more difficult to defend in the future and the USSR would get a naval base in Hanko at the South Western coast. The western allies kept promising help through Norway and Sweden, but both nations refused to allow troops to transit. While Finland used the Western sup...

The Kinnunen brothers, 14 years old Eino and two years younger Väinö were expecting the 6th of June in 1943 to be another boring day in a long line of similar summer days, spent working and playing in their family farm in the eastern Kainuu. Victims of the Viianki partisan raid  Eino was running some errands for his father outside the farm, when a group of armed men grabbed his shoulder. Eino was brutally interrogated by the commander of the Soviet partisan unit about the presence of Finnish soldiers in the village. After receiving confirmation that there were no soldiers in the village the Partisans shot the fourteen-year-old twice to the back with a rifle and left him to die in a pool of his own blood. At the same time the rest of the 14 members of his extended family were in the family sauna, where they were living after their homestead was burned during the 1939-40 Winter War. Minutes later the door of the Sauna was kicked in and 17 Russian partisans stepped in. The le...

Every nation has defining moments in its history, but few have such a powerful single event that embodies the people and spirit of the nation as Winter War is for Finland. The war forged a nation divided by a bloody war of independence into one entity that stood with grim determination against hopeless odds and survived to tell the tale. Finnish troops fighting in the Arctic wilderness Before the Russian invasion that begun on the 30 th of November in 1939, most Finns were blissfully unaware of the forces Stalin had assigned for what he expected to be an easy victory. The Red Army had devised a plan to attack Finland along the whole 1300 km long border with 21 divisions that had 450 000 men. Russian DB bomber shot down by the Finnish Air-Force Soviets highlighted the totalitarian nature of their invasion already on the first day of the war as bomber formations unleashed hell upon Finnish cities. It’s still somewhat debated whether the attacks on civilian popu...

On October 5 th  1939 the USSR invited Finnish representatives to negotiations in Moscow. The Finnish government draw the correct conclusion that USSR was going to demand territory and bases from Finland. But the Finnish government wasn’t ready to roll over in the negotiations. The signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany and the following invasion of Poland by the two, had made the Finnish leadership somewhat alarmed. During the October 1939 the USSR had demanded bases from the Baltic states. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania saw that they had no choice but to comply with the demands as they were trapped between the co-operating dictatorships. Some leverage had to be created for the Finnish government. So it was decided that the best way to counter the Soviet pressure was to mobilize the Finnish army . But instead of announcing a general mobilization, Finland begun an “extra refresher training for the reservists”.  Finnish Cavalry de...