William Middleton 🇺🇸🇮🇹🇬🇷

One advantage Stubb has is familiarity with the specific peace process Putin is demanding. During the Winter War, Finland sued for peace and negotiated under fire - the war did not end until the Moscow Peace Treaty was signed, at which point Helsinki ceded roughly 10% of its territory. The process was: negotiate while the war is still active, accept the terms, sign, and only then does the fighting stop. Ukraine and the West are currently demanding the opposite: a ceasefire first, then negotiations, all while rearming in the interim. Finland spun the outcome as a national victory - the "Miracle of the Kalevala" - and Ukraine will likely try to do the same. By March 1940, Finland was militarily defeated. Stalin could have annexed the country or made it a Soviet satellite, as he did with the Baltics that same year. Instead, he only modestly escalated his pre-war territorial demands - taking Vyborg and the Karelian Isthmus in full rather than a 30 km buffer, and dropping the land swap Finland would have received in return - while preserving Finnish sovereignty. The terms were punitive but not maximalist. That restraint was a security failure. By preserving Finnish sovereignty rather than neutralizing the country, Stalin created the condition for Finland to ally with Nazi Germany in 1941 and fight alongside Hitler's armies. Collaborationist Finnish forces advanced to the 1939 border, severed the last rail line into Leningrad, and proposed joint naval operations on Lake Ladoga to strangle the city's supply routes. The result was the starvation of up to a million Soviet civilians. The same logic applies now: a sovereign Ukraine embedded in NATO's security architecture does not permanently end the war - it converts a ceasefire into the staging ground for the next one, with a NATO-backed army on Russia's western border and with once again a Finnish northern flank. From Moscow's perspective, the 1940 lesson is unambiguous: failure to neuter a defeated enemy on your border is an invitation to further death and destruction. So Stubb's best-case scenario is a repeat of the Treaty of Moscow: Ukraine maintains the sovereignty needed to fight another day in exchange for territorial concessions, and the outcome is spun domestically as a Ukrainian victory. On the other hand, Putin's job is to impose the Ukrainian version of the post-WW2 policy of "Finlandization" - permanent geopolitical neutering, with limited economic sovereignty as the concession that keeps the population from rebelling. The two outcomes may look similar on the map. The primary difference being whether the defeated country can one day soon remerge as a military threat.