Alright, welcome to the Neuvottelija channel. Pekka Toveri, this must be
your sixth time, is that right? Yeah. So we got off to a good start right after this
brutal Russian war of aggression, back in March
[Music] 2022. And now you've either
written a very well-timed book, or a book that's aged badly in your hands, because you have to
So, Pekka Toveri: On the Ukraine War, just came off the press. Well, I have to
remember - the book focuses quite a lot on how we ended up in the war,
how the war has been fought so far, what lessons can be learned from it, because at the end
there's only a brief look at these possible peace negotiations, so
most of it is still pretty much up to date, yeah. And you're referring now
here to how the Ukraine peace negotiations have moved really
fast because of the Trump administration. And this will probably go out of date the moment
it's in your hands. But as we're recording this, Ukraine is about to go to America,
Zelenskyi is about to sign the minerals deal, and Britain's
Prime Minister Keir Starmer is probably going to negotiate
boots on the ground, that is, using European troops there
for Ukraine's security guarantees. So what's your gut feeling here - is this
Trump's game landing happily, or what could still go wrong? Well,
quite a lot could still go wrong, because
a lot is happening, really, in how Trump is handling these things, so
it looks like the Americans, the Trump administration, don't really have any
clear plan for what to actually do here. And it seems like they go in
at full speed, throwing out incredible, tough demands
and then immediately cave the moment there's even a little
resistance. And there are still many things wide open here, like what
the Russians will say. Let's just say the good thing is that something is being done
instead of - unlike the Biden administration, which just kept repeating that we
'll support Ukraine for as long as it takes,' which isn't really a strategy.
That's a strategy of bleeding Ukraine dry. Now at least there's an attempt to get
the fighting to stop, some kind of peace - that's a positive
thing. And of course right at the start there were a lot of
shocking things, like basically appeasing Russia, essentially feeding
into Russia's hands time after time without Russia having to give anything back
- it started to look bad, this - this minerals deal. Well,
first of all, it's of course pretty outrageous
that you'd start extracting from a country at war, that's fighting
for its very existence. But on the other hand, if the United States
secures certain interests for itself in Ukraine, then of course
in a sense that's also pushing the Russians back a bit, like
'hey, this is our thing, don't come in here.' But like I said,
this is still entirely - the negotiations haven't
really started yet, and there are so many things to sort out that it's
impossible to say where this ends up in the end, because the big question
is still completely unresolved, one that hasn't even really been discussed properly yet
- and that is, where do we get Ukrainian security guarantees, credible security guarantees, so
that the peace actually has some chance of succeeding. Yeah, in my opinion
the best scenario would be - I mean, this minerals deal isn't necessarily that
bad. I mean, Finland doesn't get much either from mineral extraction, then,
in compensation. But here there's still this clear
joint venture - a commercial 50-50 split - and still, they'll have to
build the mineral extraction capability there, it doesn't exist yet, so this isn't
some purely colonialist deal, like it first looked.
But if the Yanks take a really transactional approach to this, they
just take the commercial angle, don't really give any security guarantees either, and then
put it on the Europeans to give those guarantees - then this
Nato European branch - how capable is it,
I mean if you just take the Americans out of the picture, would we manage against
the Russians? Well, you have to remember that if we're talking about Europe's
defence, then those forces are 95% European forces
that would actually be used for that defence here. But our challenge is
that if Nato went to war tomorrow, the key shared
capabilities - strategic air surveillance, strategic
air-to-air refueling capability, intelligence, surveillance, command, targeting, long
range strike capability - those come from the Americans, and
Americans hold significant
positions in those command structures, so if these capabilities aren't there, then
waging war gets quite a bit more challenging. It's not impossible, though, yeah -
for example Finland still has plans and capability
for how to defend Finland. We still have the ability to lead all
the Defence Forces' fighting in Finland. But leading the bigger overall picture
would become more challenging. So there are then many different options -
like, say Trump says we're pulling ground troops out of here and the air force
out of here too - like I said, those don't actually represent that small a share of
the military capability to fight. But if we still support
the Americans in the command structure and they keep doing their jobs, and
intelligence, surveillance, and command capabilities are still available, then in the end it
wouldn't change things all that dramatically. Yeah, and now this is of course a kind of
wake-up call. I mean, Finland has always been awake to this. We probably have
some of the very best, among the best, relatively speaking,
Defence Forces in Europe, so improving capabilities - you have
a lot about this in the book, and we can think about it more later - what
else is still needed. But many other European countries are in a bit of a
situation now where they're pushing for conscription, and it's not exactly
- will we have to bring that in here too, and basically have to start almost
from zero, it feels like. Well yeah, in many, many things you still have to
remember that Nato's European pillar - Nato's European
member states - they have 1.6 million soldiers, mostly professional soldiers, in the ranks,
some reserves too, there are almost 5,000
battle tanks, almost 3,000 combat aircraft, and so on,
and so on, over 60 submarines - so it's substantial military
capability. What's missing is materiel, I mean
ammunition, supplies to keep fighting the war for longer. What's missing is
the defence-industry capacity to keep that war going for a long time, because
nobody can really stockpile enough materiel for three years
of warfare - there's no sense in that, it's not cost-effective. But
you need enough that you can start the war and fight it
for a few months, and then the defence industry starts pushing out
more and more materiel so that there's no end in sight, because
the defence industry keeps it running. So there's a lot of room for improvement on that front,
and of course also personnel, reserves - you can't fight a war for a long time
with just that kind of professional army, it almost requires - there should be
conscription, so that you also get, so to speak, people into the Russian meat grinder
- the manpower for this brutal war that's basically what all
European professional armies are manned at, something like 80-90% strength,
roughly, when they've recruited enough people. Only those that have
conscription have no problem recruiting professional officers and NCOs
either, because it's conscription - one of the good things about it is
that it's an excellent recruitment channel specifically for that professional
career track, plus at the same time it builds that broad reserve that's then
needed if things kick off. Well, you'd think they'd be here visiting now to see
how we can get this up and running, or are we just being naive here,
thinking that Russia, over there, according to one scenario, is
almost winning that. Well yeah, this is - Russia has
excellent information campaigns, they've successfully managed to give
the impression that they'd somehow got the upper hand. Russia doesn't have the military
capability to defeat Ukraine - they've been grinding at it for three years, grinding, and they can't
beat Ukraine. And even if they managed to break through the defence lines in Donetsk,
they don't have the capability for any deep blitzkrieg-style operations to conquer
large areas. Their economy is in really serious trouble - for about a year
they can keep grinding at this kind of volume, and after that it'll start to
really squeeze them. Of course it's a dictatorship, so they can just throw
more taxes on people, they can decide to cut all the social
benefits, and people won't dare take to the streets because they'll be met with machine guns, and
limping along like this, they can keep going for a few more years, but it's
not a picnic in any way, in any sense. Russia isn't
winning anything. And this - this is exactly what sometimes annoys me a bit,
this scare-mongering that Russia's about to attack Europe any moment. Well, for three
years they've been trying against the Ukrainians and haven't achieved anything, haven't
managed to pull off a victory, so what would even be the conditions for them
to attack Nato's professional armies, or say, Finland's advanced
conscript-based army - in my opinion, not really convincing. Yeah, but then
maybe if they get some kind of peace here now, and rearm, and
build up their forces, then a few years down the line the bow will be
drawn taut again. But that's something to think about. At the start of the book there was that
historical section, and this idea of Russia's expansionist
- or you could say, maybe your ex-colleague's idea of Russia's
strategic culture, the idea behind it being that it's like a spreading amoeba
that just can't help itself, that it maliciously wants to expand,
and you just have to accept that, that's just how it is. And then it feels like
here in the West too there are a lot of these so-called realists, and they
call themselves these Mearsheimer types who say that this should even
be understood. So basically that Russia's expansion needs to be understood
at the very least as this kind of buffer zone, and Ukraine should have always
just accepted its fate as a buffer zone. And in a way this
kind of historical talk about how Nato shouldn't expand eastward - that would have
actually been justified. There's actually a lot of this kind of talk going around now,
these days. Maybe it's Putin's talking points, but these are still Americans who talk
like this. Well, Americans who don't understand Russia, don't understand the Russian way of fighting
and look at it through a great-power lens. They don't understand Europe any better,
and think, well, in the big picture, what do
some small nations matter there - they don't understand that small nations have their own
own aspirations, their own needs to secure their own safety. You have to remember
that Nato hasn't forced anyone to join it - all those countries that
Russia has attacked over the centuries, occupied them,
subjugated, plundered and raped them - they wanted security, and when they finally
got the chance, when Russia was so - Russia was so weak
it couldn't stop them joining Nato, they all took that opportunity
and used it. And talk about Nato being some kind of military threat
to Russia, and that this war supposedly needs to be fought because of that - that's just
nonsense. The idea that a 32-nation defence alliance that can only just
barely manage to agree on joint defence would attack
even a single state, with, what, 1,500 combat-ready spearhead troops
on standby - that's completely absurd, it's never going to happen. And yes, Putin knows this.
Nato is a threat to him precisely because Nato stops him from subjugating his neighboring countries.
Along with Nato comes all sorts of nonsense like democracy, anti-corruption
efforts, rule-of-law principles - which are of course a threat
to dictatorships. And the closer it gets to his borders, the more uncomfortable
it gets for those dictators. That's what this is really about. If all these
former Warsaw Pact border states hadn't been let into Nato, what would
the situation be - Putin picking off those countries one at a time, and
Western Europe wringing its hands wondering what on earth should be
done. Mm, yeah. Well, let's move on to the next section of the book, the
historical documentation. And this is interesting for us doom
scrollers. I mean, over three years I've probably watched, I don't know, 5,000
videos about the situation in Ukraine, and these five videos we've
made here on the Neuvottelija channel are, in a way,
interesting documents in themselves. The first one was indeed
in March, right when it was still fresh, right after the invasion, when
we talked - and in this book too there's a lot of discussion
about the attempt to seize Hostomel, or rather, about that
surprise attack, and then about the fighting around the Kyiv area. Wasn't that
one whole episode that was really quite significant at the
start - of course, because Kyiv is, after all, Ukraine's
center of political and economic power, and if it had been lost to the Russians -
if the Russians had managed to take it, then Ukraine's
defence would have gotten really quite challenging. And, well, traditionally,
as I said, when the Russians conquer a country
they generally always try to take the capital first, precisely
for these reasons. Yeah, then thinking about Mariupol, there was a lot
of a bit of a Stalingrad-siege feel to it, and somehow you hoped
against all expectations that they'd somehow have managed to stop the land bridge
forming to Crimea, but it went the other way. Was there any hope at all in
Mariupol, or did the Russians just somehow throw a huge amount of resources at it -
not really, it was pretty clear that the Ukrainians
weren't going to be able to free Mariupol. But the Russians, on the other hand, made a bit of
the same mistake on a smaller scale that the Germans made at Stalingrad, in that
they had to tie down forces there in urban combat, which is
far more grinding than what the Ukrainians had
defending there. And this delayed, delayed their advance then toward
Donetsk and the north, which gave the Ukrainians time to get things
in order. And this time bought, which the defenders of Mariupol
gained over several weeks, was very important, because when the
southern coastal area was lost to Russia very quickly, the Ukrainians
still got time to stop the Russian
advance there and hold - build some kind of defence lines.
Yeah, and then the northeast - that was a nice surprise for me. Basically Ukraine
somehow just broke through in the Kharkiv and Kherson areas, like
somehow it was amazing, they just advanced like a proper blitzkrieg,
style, covering hundreds of kilometers there - that was pretty impressive, and
I don't know if the Russians had somehow just, just fallen asleep
there. Yeah, yeah, and the Russians have had these lapses happen every now and
then, where no information comes up from the tactical level saying,
'by the way, something's being planned here' - it's dismissed as nonsense, 'don't see monsters where there aren't any.' No, no
point taking those seriously, because there's this confirmation bias that the Ukrainians won't
- and they fell completely for the Ukrainians' deception in these
matters, that there were thinly deployed, lightly equipped units there,
National Guard-type troops, and once it started rolling, there was no longer
any capability to respond to it, and panic set in. Yeah, and in my opinion this
whole thing also kind of started a bit with the Black Sea
situation - Russia isn't really that strong a Black Sea power without
Crimea, and the naval base is there, so in a way then
Ukraine, really just with Odesa and quite a small stretch of coastline,
still managed astonishingly well in the Black - yeah, that's - because this
warfare has otherwise been fairly traditional, even if drones are flying around everywhere, it's
still pretty traditional warfare there in the naval battles.
But there, a really significant technological breakthrough happened, in that
Ukraine, which lost its navy right at the very start,
built up capability with unmanned surface vessels,
long-range strikes with drones and aircraft and cruise missiles, and started waging
long-range warfare, with which they actually broke Russia's naval blockade and drove Russia's
navy back there, so that it no longer dared move, say, from Crimea
westward at all, and after that they even drove them out of Crimea,
in terms of basing, once they destroyed a Kilo-class submarine in dry dock there,
and other similar things, struck the navy's headquarters, and
airbases were knocked out, and so on, and Russia was really forced
to pull its basing back to the eastern edge of the Black Sea, to build
a new naval base there, which is also being targeted - so yeah, it
was quite a feat by the Ukrainians. Yeah, I had one
conversation there with Jarmo Lindberg, and Wallenheim was also in it, there was
this Ukrainian aid organization that came, to a parliamentary
...for a parliamentary visit, and the Ukrainian said that with our Iceye—
—satellite, one submarine was located and destroyed, so
Finns have helped in this naval war too. Yeah, right. And that's
the most important thing — when you're building long-range
strike capability, you need cruise mis— Ukraine will soon have cruise missiles that
fly 3,000 — 3,000 kilometers — with an accuracy of a few meters, so
there's no use in that if you can't provide targeting with a few meters'
accuracy. So that immediately places demands on your targeting capability, and, and, and
yeah, you need something like an Iceye-type SAR radar, with which you're able to
actually target those targets with sufficient accuracy, and you'd need
maybe even something like time-sensitive targeting, if you have enough
capabilities available, and you're also able to do BDA, that is, battle damage assessment
and that's important — when you set some depot on fire, then there's
a big smoke cloud, and through it you can't see with electro-optical equipment
what effect was actually achieved. But with a SAR radar you can
look and go, ah, that hangar and that one and that one have been destroyed like this, and these haven't been destroyed
yet, except for a single pipe. So, in all these capabilities, we have
significant know-how and capability, which we should — which is worth being proud of,
that Finns have managed to build something like this too. Yeah. And then here,
kind of, in the moment of success, the joy was spoiled—
—allegedly Starlink cut the power right when a drone strike had just been carried out
and that just shows you need to have that guidance technology, kind of,
spread across several layers — you can't rely on just one, one system. Yeah,
yeah, right, right. And here, using commercial technologies
has shown its strength, but then of course also its vulnerability, then
indeed, if — if the, uh, Western oligarch who happens to own
that capability, happens to disagree on the matter. Well, now the Poles
have bought this Starlink capability in advance, and then
if it starts getting cut off, that's a breach of contract. So these are interesting
things. Yeah, the Poles have really put in — they've put in 5 percent
of GDP, and they've really taken this seriously — they have no
illusions about the Russians. Sometimes you get the feeling that
the Poles aren't preparing to defend Warsaw, but to take Moscow
but, well, they've really invested massively, and there too, once again,
all of us, all of Russia's border neighbors, are prisoners of our history, in that
we have those harsh experiences, and we know and understand the Russians, we
know what can come from there at its worst, and the Poles have stated that
they've been partitioned enough times — they've been
carved up enough times that now they won't give in anymore. Yeah. Then we had one
legendary episode — it was the same weekend, right after, uh, Prigozhin's—
—march to conquer Moscow. So, in a way, here was this, uh,
Putin's mercenary army, and it somehow personified for me that Bakhmut
grinding advance — at one point it was this kind of endless
discussion: are they going in there or not, and how is this Prigozhin thing going. So
this was, honestly, a completely surreal event, in my opinion,
at that point. Yeah, it just shows how fragile such a—
—dictatorship is, in that most of those people there aren't genuinely
loyal — they're opportunists seeking high positions for themselves, so that they
can steal more of Russia's national wealth. They're not genuinely
loyal supporters of Putin's — supporters. And if it looks like Putin is losing
his position, then instead of rushing straight to the TV studio to declare
that we'll fight to the last bullet and the last breath
for our president — well, everyone just stood there, caught off guard,
frozen in place, watching to see what would happen, and, well, Prigozhin just went and
chickened out — it would've been worth pushing it all the way through. But yeah, anyway, I
remember there was a lot of discussion at the time about this, like, the boyar layer, that
there's Shoigu and Surovikin and Prigozhin and
in a way Putin still, kind of, even now, in some war situations, plays
them off against one another — it feels, kind of, quite
chaotic — shouldn't there be some kind of command structure there? But
that's a pretty wild thing too, even at the very top level. Yeah, like, like
we said, it all comes down to the dictator pitting
the boyars against each other, so that no
cliques form — nobody rises to become too strong a candidate to challenge his
position. So then sometimes even the chain of command can be
unclear, even though the formal command relationships are clear, but who
actually gives the orders in the end, whose orders get listened to — that can always
vary a bit depending on the situation. Yeah. Then, after that, came maybe, kind of,
a bit of hubris — in that, now that there was a breakthrough in the northeast, and
the Black Sea was, kind of, taken back somewhat, and the Bakhmut thing didn't quite go
through — so then, specifically, Surovikin had built
something that seemed like it might be a kind of Maginot Line, one that
you could actually just walk over. But then Ukraine's counteroffensive fizzled out, and we
had a stretch there too where I speculated whether they'd pull off something with those newly
received battle tanks, kind of
in the style of the Kherson counteroffensive — just straight over the border. But no,
that kind of fizzled too — all that came of it were a few small dents along the border. Yeah,
and there, of course, the starting position was weak, because, because
the Russians had managed to carry out that indiscriminate mining, so that there
were minefields, kind of, hundreds of kilometers deep even, and, well, with that
the attacking force didn't have enough clearing equipment, especially since
the clearing equipment had been spread out all over the place, and the basic — the basic thing
in that kind of attack is concentration of force — you need to
run it like an army-level operation, where the entire strength of several brigades—
all the artillery, all the clearing capability, everything is concentrated on getting that
breach made, after which, once you get through, then into depth and
at speed. And, traditionally, in this kind of
breakthrough phase, casualties are heavy, but after the breakthrough, those casualties and
material losses drop significantly, once you're back there in the enemy's rear, and
hammering their supply units and artillery and so on, and
Ukraine didn't have the expertise — the expertise, the capability, and maybe not even the courage,
because it's always a high-risk move. And what if it fails anyway?
the losses would be quite large, a lot of strength lost. So instead, they did small,
company- — company-level operations, where the strength runs out right at the start. Yeah, and then
it started looking a bit bad — expensive
Western equipment and, in a way, defense resources were being burned through, and then began, in my
opinion, a rather, rather depressing period, in that
the Russians learned they could use old scrap equipment — not so much the tanks
of which they have endless stockpiles somewhere in the Urals, but, well, they noticed
that these glide bombs can be dropped from a distance, really cheaply, and it
looked really bad once they started hammering away with these
glide bombs along the eastern front. Yeah, and that's really it — in warfare, this kind of
technology development always accelerates fast, and, and, and
well, the Russians aren't completely incompetent either — they really do have
stockpiles full of these old, uh, dumb bombs, so this glide-bomb
kit doesn't cost much, and you already get considerably greater accuracy, and
they can be dropped from outside Ukraine's air-defense range, so it's a good weapon, and
that's really what Russia's advance
over the past year was based on — they're able to, because Ukraine has built
its defense quite heavily around built-up areas. There, in the cellars,
they're a bit better protected from Russian artillery, but when you drop
a thousand-kilo glide bomb, then even the cellar goes. And with this they're able to
break through Ukraine's defense from above. But now, there too,
there's been development on the other side as well, in that
now the Russians are complaining on Telegram that
Ukrainian jamming is stopping them — the glide bombs don't work anymore in many
areas — they don't come anywhere near their targets, and they can't be used
anymore. So it's weapon and counter-weapon. Yeah. And then this
drone technology — as such, I got the impression that a
airfield's, like, hangars being destroyed is a fairly easy thing to repair, but
I mean, Ukraine is able to reach really deep with those drone strikes and destroy
airfields, sort of forcing a move — a bit like how the Black Sea fleet
had to relocate over to the far end of the eastern ports. In my
opinion, those tactical bombers too had to sort of
retreat to a suboptimal distance. Yeah, definitely — there have been surprises
for the Russians, and indeed, given that they still have strategic
bombers, Tu-95s, and older-generation ones, so
well, there aren't that many of them — we're talking maybe some dozens of units — and they,
when the bases came under attack, they were moved further away, straight
into shelter, all the way out to Kola and even further too, but the problem is
that it doesn't — doesn't prevent their use, they can still be used, but
on the other hand, since the transit flights are much longer — instead of flying
from, say, 500 km away to go drop — launch —
the cruise missiles and back to base, now they have to fly a couple thousand kilometers more, and that eats into
the airframes — operational availability keeps wearing down the whole time, and, well,
in this way, this way too, it looked like — when, when finally,
at last, toward the end of last year, the Biden administration started
waking up a bit, as time was running out, and permission was given that
the ATACMS, the Army Tactical Missiles, could be used—
into the Russian rear, to a depth of a couple hundred kilometers, which forced the Russians
to move exactly these front-line combat aircraft,
the Su-35s, Su-34s, and other similar ones that drop these glide bombs — to move
them further away again. And yeah, the Ukrainians did notice that the bombs—
the number of bombs dropped, dropped, because the transit flights are longer, so with the same
airframes you can't fly as many, many sorties. Yeah, that does have
an effect too — it's just that the impact comes much more slowly. Yeah, somehow it looks
like this war has been this kind of shift measured in kilometers — that at first
it was within artillery range, a few tens of kilometers, and you could see across to the other side of the border,
and then it's strategic bombers and glide bombs — the Americans, kind of, in my
opinion, have kept stretching this range the whole time throughout this war, yeah.
That's really the thing — as this aid gets given out drop by drop, little by little, which
means Russia has been able to react to it. When HIMARS arrived — okay, so they move—
the logistics get dispersed, the logistics get moved further away, they move
the command posts to safety, and they learned to operate. Well, then along came a bit
of longer-range capability in between, so they move again — so Ukraine hasn't
gotten to the point of, in one go, just unleashing
it deep across the whole depth with a broad weapons mix all at once, which would have been
a systemic collapse for the Russians. That hasn't happened, because they've
been able to keep gradually improving their own operations the whole time. Yeah. Then
here — well, Avdiivka was, in my opinion, a bit similar, a kind of grinding, roughly the same
shift compared to Bakhmut, so maybe we can skip over that, unless there's
something interesting in your view. But then there was the Kursk incursion — for me
it was Emil Kastehelmi — I just had to laugh out loud when he said that
for the first time in ages, German tanks in Kursk. That
really did come completely out of nowhere — this Kursk offensive, at least for me. Yeah, it
just shows that even today, kind of,
intelligence systems are advanced and there are sensors everywhere, and you'd imagine
you have a complete picture of the situation — despite that, you still have the chance
to achieve operational surprise, like Ukraine managed to, by
doing a bit of deception — a bit of deception, and by dispersing — quite
traditional concealment measures — and, well, you manage to surprise the other side
and, well, that in itself was, for Ukraine, quite a good move to try to take
the initiative — not all objectives were achieved, but some objectives were
achieved, that's how it is, but at least now they have one
negotiating chip, and it does look like they're holding on to it, precisely for that
reason — so there'd be some negotiating chip. Probably, probably even the Ukrainians a bit
underestimated just how little Putin cares about how the average
Russian is doing — that if, say, 100,000, or however many, thousand Russian civilians
are forced to flee their homes and can't get back, then — on the contrary,
they'll level those Russian towns flat. It's worth remembering
that when the first — the first Chechen war was fought, then, well,
Grozny, which was a city almost the size of Helsinki, its
core center was completely destroyed. Thousands of people died — they were mainly
Russians, because the Russians lived in the better housing there, in the city
center — they'd been pushed out to the slums on the outskirts. But that made
no difference at all — a Russian life meant nothing whatsoever, so
it's total war from one side's perspective. Ukraine has, surprisingly well,
kept things, in a way, kind of clean — but now it too has started going after
industrial targets, blowing them up — you always get a nice big bang when an oil
refinery goes up, and a few technicians die in the process. So it's not really
quite that clean-cut anymore, in the sense that Ukraine, kind of, down to every
millimeter, carries out its attacks — well, no, they, they focus, they try
— they don't try to kill civilians the way Russia deliberately tries to kill civilians,
to maximize the suffering inflicted on civilians, by striking energy infrastructure
and bombing
railway stations, and carrying out exactly these kinds of double-tap strikes
aimed at killing the rescuers who come to help the people trapped in the rubble
They — they shell with artillery, hit — throw everything at — Ukrainian
settlements that are within artillery range get shelled
constantly, or else, well, individual
civilians who are out on a shopping trip are hunted down with drones, and then they proudly post
videos showing off: 'got myself a kill, a Ukrainian civilian, great job.' So,
well, Ukraine hasn't stooped to this kind of, this kind of appalling behavior.
Instead, they still strike against industrial targets or military targets
— and the industrial targets are, without exception, all ones that
support Russia's war effort, either by earning currency there, or
by producing weapons there. So Ukraine is waging what you could call lawful warfare, while Russia is waging
completely unlawful warfare. Yeah, and that — honestly, I've found it incomprehensible
that this gas pipeline hasn't, like, been broken during the war — the one that ran through Ukraine
over to Hungary. But this, too, this commercial side of things, is then
interesting. And, well, on that note, back to Trump — let's go back to the start
of this — so how is Trump's deal going to play out. The most frightening moment
was when whoever it was — some name I don't quite recall — already started talking about some kind of commercial
cooperation with the Russians — and that already implies that these sanctions
would go away. And that's really — I mean, if you pull the plug out of that,
it's really hard to put back — then Russia recovers pretty quickly. Yeah, and there
— that's where the biggest risks are, because right now they've
already, as part of their cost-cutting measures, practically halted
the monitoring operation — and that's, like, in the US sanctions regime, they have
a global monitoring regime that they use to track sanctions enforcement, and that's
the thing that, in my view, has scared the Chinese — that they don't dare, don't dare
support Russia at quite the same pace, don't necessarily even dare to buy oil
from these shadow tankers, precisely because they're afraid that the axe
will fall on them. Now this monitoring regime has apparently, apparently been wound down, which
is a real problem, because, because the European Union — which now has 16
sanctions packages in place, and a 17th sanctions package is being prepared —
doesn't have as good a global monitoring regime, which, which makes it
easier to circumvent the sanctions. And, well, yeah, these sanctions
absolutely need to stay in force right up until every last
kidnapped Ukrainian child has been returned, the last prisoner of war has been returned,
war criminals have been brought to justice, and, well, war reparations have been agreed. Otherwise, if, if
that's not done, then, then there's not the slightest interest in observing those
agreements that were made. Yeah. I sort of suspect we won't get all the way there — it's too
difficult. So here, probably, there'll be some kind of, sort of
hardship for Finland — well, then you just have to swallow a bitter compromise, but we might
get to keep our independence at least. That's, in my — yeah, here, kind of,
hard to get, like, a total, complete victory. Yeah, no, no, no, no,
not necessarily. But that doesn't mean you should give up, and
just, just — not just because
we should now prevent greedy capitalists from being the very first to
be the first ones again, backed by foolish politicians, to start
buying energy from Russia again, get trade relations back on track, and
get cross-border trade going, without understanding or caring that exactly this
way — like you said — Russia rebuilds its armed forces again and attacks us
the moment it gets another chance. Nokian Tyres' factory already went
for a bargain price. Maybe Fortum's multi-billion-euro energy plant gets sold off too,
in maybe somewhat bad taste, as the main point here — but a lot of people think, well,
even he's quite a cold transactionalist about it. I mean, this is, in my
opinion, a distasteful situation, but if the Trump administration is now
that transactional, then we just have to adapt to that too. But
maybe then, militarily speaking, if you think about it, there will be long analyses
later about the capabilities of the forces and how they were used, and
then conclusions will come about what, for example, Finland can learn from this, and what kind of
readiness and capabilities we should then now
build up. Yeah, it's a moving target we're shooting at right now, because the war
is still ongoing — a lot of things are
based on assumptions. We don't really know what's actually happened, and
then, once the fighting ends at some point and you've spent a couple of years analyzing it,
we'll have a clear picture of what the things are that we need to
learn from it. But some picture of it we can already form, and some assessment we can already
make. On a large scale you can certainly say that Finland's
Defence Forces development — for years we've done exactly the right things. We have
exactly the kind of system that Ukrainians wish they had,
and when you think about how this has succeeded so well, then
you have to remember that our forces were developed specifically against a Russian
attack, and based on intelligence,
we looked at what kind of system the Russians were developing, what kind of war they
fight, and then created a system with which that Russian
attack could be stopped — now that Russia attacks the way we
assumed it would, attacking there in Ukraine a bit worse, but
still along exactly the same principles. And as it turns out, Ukrainians wish
they had exactly the system that we built to stop
a Russian attack. Yeah — thinking about that crossing-the-border thing,
how the mood swings there — on one hand, for Ukraine with Kursk,
it turned out surprisingly easy, they just crossed some kind of soft border, waging war
on Russian territory. Or then down south, in the early stage of the war,
from Crimea especially, the Russians managed to seize territory really fast
— is Finland's eastern border now? Classically it's been built a bit so that from there
you can get across, but then pushback suddenly starts coming. So is there, like,
in a way, any tactical benefit to that, from that border region
or is it better to somehow leave it a bit deserted, or what's
the game there? Well, no — the intention is to keep the whole of Finland
inhabited, and also to support the eastern — the eastern border. That's in the current government's
programs too. And we're trying to get support from the EU so that those empty
wilderness areas don't necessarily go unguarded by any defender — though, yeah, there
does need to be some kind of active presence. But the fact is that
if you look at last century's wars fought against Russia, or
against the Soviet Union — twice they tried, from north of Lake Ladoga,
to attack, using that long eastern border. And both
times — in the Winter War as well as in the Continuation War — those forces
were surrounded and destroyed there. So there were all the
battles — Suomussalmi in the Winter War, and the Ilomantsi
battles in the Continuation War — it's extremely challenging terrain to run
large-unit offensives through. Maybe that's gotten a bit easier over this
century — but yes, our biggest advantage is our terrain,
weather conditions, and location. This is a challenging place for Russia, because here
forces have to be concentrated — their
core support area is quite far away, over fairly difficult and sparse
transport infrastructure, so we'd see well in advance if
apparently that Grumpy Neighbor is trying to start doing something again —
massing troops. And then once the actual operation starts, your rear area
— the logistics and support — depends on very sparse, poor
transport infrastructure that we're able to strike, and now we have a much
better ability to do that now that we're a Nato country. And when you set out
to attack, ahead of you is that pretty challenging, difficult terrain where your
forces can't operate the way Finns know how to operate. That was already true in Soviet
times too — fighting in Finland was a kind of special warfare,
in Finnish forest terrain, which requires special equipment, special units, which
the Russians didn't have, and still don't — so it's not easy to come here.
Yeah, and then we've invested really well in things like HIMARS and
similar long-range missile systems. Then there's the air side —
the F-18 can already do quite well with that kind of air-to-ground,
cruise missiles, essentially, with really long range, to wreck things. And
the F-35 certainly won't be any worse. No — and this is exactly it: when
you build up national capability, you need it at the strategic,
operational and tactical levels — that's where things get done. And the
strategic level, where the political leadership together with the military
leadership decides how these things get done — that's where the political
decisions matter more than anything, and things like whether there's a large
defence budget, whether we have universal conscription or not, and
whether we form alliances or not. And now we've made the right decisions —
the decisions that give us a system producing that large reserve, because however
it goes, in war it's always certain that people die and get wounded, and more
people are needed. We have that large reserve so that we're able to defend this large
territory credibly, and users can be found — equipment can be found for those
users. Then, at the operational level too, there need to be good
plans for how this is done. And that expertise
at the tactical level and the combat-technical level, knowing how to use and exploit
our own conditions here — all of this we've developed over decades, and this
is one thing that has come up a lot during this war, the Ukraine war —
the fact that when Western countries start
training Ukrainian soldiers in Western countries, they get taught Western-style warfare, which
basically means you have complete
air superiority, complete control of the electromagnetic spectrum, a huge logistics
system backing you up, and then you go and beat them up. Well, then
the guys get sent back to Ukraine, where none of that exists. So the
kind of warfare taught there doesn't fit what's actually happening in Ukraine.
The Finnish volunteers who've been training Ukrainians over there have
gotten a lot of really good, positive feedback, because
Finnish tactics have always been the tactics of the outnumbered, because we
started from the premise that we're up against the Soviet Union, which has air superiority and
electronic-warfare jamming capability, superior artillery, and so on —
that kind of tactic works, works against a numerically and technically superior opponent.
You exploit the attacker's weaknesses and your own strengths, and that's
how it plays out. That Russian mechanized attack formation,
they just somehow don't quite know how to advance properly — thankfully — but
that kind of grinding with artillery and glide bombs — that they
do seem to be world-class at now. Yeah, yeah, you have to remember that, thank God,
the Russians have historically been well behind the West in operational skill —
back when, sometime in the '30s, the Germans were only just starting to see
the first signs of that kind of warfare — Blitzkrieg — the Russians had already
been developing deep-battle doctrine for decades, and operational-level
warfare, where every branch of the forces works, works together
But thank God, they never actually had the ability to develop
that kind of million-man mass army that could actually carry out the operations
that their best operational minds had developed and
planned — how that war should be fought. In the late stages of World War Two, they
were finally starting to reach that level, after years of training
and letting capable officers do the job. And they got
support from the West so the forces could actually move, because otherwise the Russians wouldn't have been able
to reach Berlin without Western support — 500,000
vehicles and all sorts of other odds and ends came from there to support this effort, but
after that, during the Soviet era, they still
developed operational skill, and quite far too. But like I said,
they were never able to develop a system capable of carrying out
these fine plans — the training level just isn't enough, and it's still not enough today. But
you have to remember, they're not stupid — they know their own system, they know how
to use that poor tool optimally,
as in, 'we have the world's best tolerance for losses.' Well, they exploit that. They
have a lot of materiel — 60-year-old tanks and old artillery and
similar stuff. And there's a lot of it, so they fight that kind of
war, and the Ukrainians are having a hard time with that. Yeah, then it feels like
in a way, our own domestic logistics, bomb shelters, and things like that,
our security-of-supply is really top-class here. But then
since we're kind of a nasty little island — if specifically
from the east side nothing can be brought in to us, since the enemy comes from there —
then that sea war shows a bit that — aren't those damn expensive
corvettes getting taken down, really expensively, with just a couple of
missiles, sunk. But still you'd need that
sea-transport logistics secured somehow, and I don't know whether those
submarines too can be taken out with those anti-submarine weapons or something else — that's
definitely a tricky one, that logistics and maritime-logistics question, so
what can we do about that. Well, on the other hand, you should remember to look at what's
happening over in the Middle East, where the Houthis are firing cruise missiles and
drones and everything else at passing shipping — there
Western frigates are shooting those cruise missiles down left and right, if they
come within engagement range, they basically always get shot down. So when
you have a bigger vessel with diverse weaponry, diverse
sensor systems, its ability to protect itself or other assets is much
better than with some small missile boat.
So a big size doesn't necessarily mean an easier target — it can actually be a much
harder target. And then again, defending against these surface-vessel USVs
— there are a lot of videos showing that the Russians, since they traditionally aren't very
good at shooting accurately, and since those weapon systems aren't designed
for intercepting these small surface targets, they get through. But it's
not a terribly complicated technical thing to install
— even on an ordinary Pohjanmaa-class corvette or a frigate — those kinds of
surface-defence systems that can shoot down all these kinds of, or
these USVs if they come at you. So once again, weapon versus USV — the USV was
a considerable surprise to the Russians. They weren't able to intercept them. Now they're
busy developing some system so they can intercept them
and protect their own warships too, and it's not any terribly
difficult task. Yeah — and from Israel there's Iron Dome and
interception technology coming, which arrives right on time — that capability too, in this
same vein. Some people say the tank is dead now that drones
get shot at by FPV drones and destroy them. Well, first of all, people forget
that the actual situation isn't that you fly one FPV into the side of a tank and it's finished —
the Ukrainians say you often need up to twenty FPVs to have any effect at all, and it
still might not even be a destructive effect. And then there's the fact that if
you dominate drones on the battlefield, you start
a protection system with electronic countermeasures or even kinetic
countermeasures. And those weigh tens, even hundreds of kilos, they often
need electricity too, so you have the sensor system you use to
detect drones, and then you have the
countermeasure system. Well, try putting that on an infantry soldier's back —
it doesn't really work. A tank is a platform that generates its own electricity, is able to
carry that around, and add more capability if needed. Then a fighting vehicle can be made
into a much harder target. Plus, with a 120mm gun, you can
kill anything in a house, in a yard, at a distance of kilometers. So it's not
— if I had to launch an attack across some open field, I'd
definitely go in a tank rather than run there myself in bulletproof
gear trying to get across it. Yeah. Well then, in a way, this
weapons-logistics question — it's probably worth having our own capabilities there. I was
at a defence seminar, and there, if
I remember correctly, even the TNT production capacity was
basically dependent on just one factory in continental Europe. Now, in Finland,
there's Nammo, and, in a way, Forcit, and we're starting really
raw explosive-charge production, which is probably a really
sensible thing to do — it won't have to come by ship from somewhere far away. Yeah. And this is nothing
new. When World War One started, after a couple of months of fighting, everyone's
stockpiles across the board were empty, and in Britain, in Great Britain too,
they talked about a shell crisis — they set up an artillery-shell
— a Ministry of Munitions, which set up factories and started
producing those shells. And then the war lasted many more
years after that. The most important thing is that you have that industrial capacity, either
in reserve, or you have agreements so that you can quickly get
it up and running — that you have enough ammunition to start off
the first months, but then industry starts producing
it quickly. And we've actually managed — our own artillery
ammunition production has been multiplied here in Finland, precisely because we had
some of that capacity — the ministry had put money into it so we'd have
certain production lines standing ready, waiting for that rainy day. Since a pessimist is never disappointed,
Finns tend to manage. So we were able to ramp that activity up quickly. We had
production agreements with various companies so that we could
start converting civilian production capacity, something like that. We need to
build that in Europe too. Like I said, the thing is that — to make
stockpiles for every European country to last three years of warfare —
there's no sense in that, because everyone assumes that every
attacker, every dictator who launches an attack, assumes it'll be a quick
success, a war wrapped up in a couple of weeks. But the only things
that are certain are that nobody knows how long a war
will last, and second, that you go into a war with whatever
you have in stock. But nobody can really afford to build
stockpiles that would last, say, three years of warfare. That defence capability
and its ability to scale up quickly — that's the key thing. Yeah, but if
we now ended up with a bit of a lousy deal in Ukraine, and then, in a way,
the Russians got to rebuild their economic capability through some kind of
ill-advised lifting of sanctions, and don't really get punished properly, and
then some kind of surge of strength comes — well then, they'd
probably be talking years before they get that
capacity tuned up enough to go again. So I'd
say that if things go badly — if Putin gets the kind of deal where
he can say 'actually, I won something here,' and gets emboldened by that, and
the West looks weak — then I'd assume he'd try
to throw down some kind of challenge for as long as Trump is president. That doesn't
mean he'd have the ability to start a war against the West, but
he could, like I said, test whether Article 5 actually works, and the West's
unity, by picking some small, small Nato country and seeing what
happens in that small case. But all in all,
as for replacing the losses it's suffered, that won't
take many years in terms of numbers, since they still have a certain
amount in storage — old tanks, old guns — that can be refurbished
there, there, there. Instead of a new T-14 Armata, or a T-9, T-90 — the T-90's
latest versions — replacing the old T-72s or even T-62s. But quantitatively,
the losses will basically be replaced — that'll take a couple of years. As for believing the Armata
will actually show up — no, no, I don't believe it. It's a huge bluff, the whole contraption, absolutely ridiculous
that it's held up as some wonder weapon. But no, they won't come. But then,
in terms of quality, replacing it so they get modern equipment — then
that's more like a 5-to-10-year project. Yeah. Still, there is
time to prepare and take this seriously. And Russia is economically
compared to Western Europe, it's a dwarf. We should remember that, well,
the West just needs to wake up to the fact that back in the good old,
during the previous Cold War, NATO countries' defence spending was between 3-5% for everyone, and now
since the Soviet Union collapsed, for 30 years we've been enjoying that peace dividend, and
money's been poured into all kinds of nice things, all kinds of nice things. Now we need to wake up to the fact
that, well, now we have to raise those budgets again up to that 3-5% range,
and we won't have money left for all those nice things anymore, so
there will certainly still be enough money to keep, to keep
the rule of law standing, and to keep the school system standing,
and to keep the healthcare system in some kind of
shape. But then all those other, nice, nice-to-have things,
we simply can't afford anymore. And now politicians just need to tell people that this
is how it is, you know: it'll take a couple of decades to bring Russia under control,
and we need to spend money on things like this, because it's still
more sensible for the national economy than the reconstruction that follows if we don't put
Russia in its place. Yeah, if this really goes well, then in a way Ukraine gets
a decent deal, and then rebuilding starts again, on commercial
terms too, sensibly - the Russians get pushed back to at least Crimea,
and then these, the Donbas and other,
border areas end up somehow neutral. And then, I don't really believe that we'll ever
get all the way to war-guilt reparations, that
goes too far already - but never, never say, never say never,
ever, because it's worth applying a bit of that Afghan principle here, that
revenge is best served cold. Because indeed there
were several Serb generals who thought, after the Bosnian war, that they'd
gotten off scot-free. Twenty-odd years had passed, and suddenly
there was a knock at the door, and it was a British SAS commando saying,
'right then, off to the Hague we go.' And yeah, at some point
the leadership in Russia might well change - situations can change - and in any
case everything has to be investigated, international and national
arrest warrants need to be issued at some point. So when the nutcase heads off
for a bit of a holiday, the Spanish police go, 'hang on a second, this guy is
a war criminal' - and off he goes. Yeah, well, it's possible somehow, it just
feels like Trump is so transactional that he'd pull out
of the WHO - he could well be crazy enough to run the UN into the ground, and then we'd
get rid of the Hague too. So this whole international world order right now
might head toward something pretty harsh, like Europe on its own. But
even in that scenario, we just take European pride and
build those capabilities, and then be worthy of Europe's forebears,
so that something good could come of this too. Yeah, so now we need to remember that, that
Trump is shaking the transatlantic link harder than it's ever been shaken during
NATO's 75-year existence. But we need to remember that within
those 75 years NATO has existed, there's been room for all kinds of American
presidents - some worse, some worse still. This is now just a four-year
bump in the road. The next president, probably, even if they're
a Republican too, will probably be a bit more normal, and especially since
if Trump manages to carry out his measures, the US will be much
weaker, both economically and militarily, than it is today. So, so, surely
a correction will come, and the most important correction is fixing,
fixing these alliance relationships up. And even right now, it's not that Trump's
administration - well, they don't like the political side of NATO policy, but the military
side is fine with them, they do understand the value of allies. But I'd
say that even so, something has
changed irreversibly, so that even if a correction
does come, and a somewhat more normal president follows, still
in Europe it's been seen that the US has turned its gaze away
from Europe, partly - looking more toward the Far East. The US has become
more inward-looking and more self-interested, and that's going to remain
the case going forward too, which means Europe, in this global
competitive world we live in, needs to be stronger, and
stronger economically, stronger militarily, and equipped with a tougher
backbone. Because up to now, over these past
decades, we've done quite a lot the way the Americans wanted - like, 20
years of war in Afghanistan, just so that we'd be good
allies. So going forward we need to, let's say, ask - what's actually
in it for us. Yeah, now since you're there, by the way - this hasn't come up yet, but
you're an MEP there, so - I honestly don't even really remember the time when we weren't
in NATO, and we had to rely on the EU's security guarantees instead. And there
still are, even now, countries like Ireland and others in the same situation
we were once in. But, do you see there in the EU whether
there's an actual defence dimension, or is it in practice just a
NATO-parallel structure? The EU's challenge is that when it was originally created as a great
peace project, the purpose was to keep, keep, keep the steel
and coal union going, and through trade, tie together, tie together
the Germans, the French, the British, so that they'd never go to war
with each other again. And that's succeeded brilliantly - real peace. But because of that,
because it's a peace project, defence doesn't fit well
into its basic structure. But clearly the will has changed - there,
it's clearly being recognised that Europe now needs to be made into a security
- and this really is the current Commission's line - that Europe is being turned into a security
and defence union. Instruments are being created for it, capabilities like that,
so it can build up that defence. And all the strategy reports on
this, the reports, point toward talking about pretty big, big sums of money -
we're talking hundreds of billions - that will be spent on defence and
on developing security within the European Union. But at the same time we need to be
careful about not going and reinventing the wheel
when there's already a NATO tool that has defended Europe for 75 years -
there's no point building it all over again. The European Union's role is to build
tools for NATO by, well, building up a defence industry, which it now
ought to know how to do, since it was originally built as an economic union. Now it's building
defence industry and capability, building military mobility, which is
a couple-hundred-billion project in itself - building proper military mobility
across Europe, building
comprehensive security, and doing research and development
so as to create the kinds of capabilities we'll need 20 years from now, and
building those joint capabilities, building European
strategic airlift, European air-refuelling capability, European
space capabilities - so that tools get built for NATO, so that we're not dependent
on the Americans. In ten years we could tell the Yanks, 'go ahead,
go fight your war out there in the Pacific in peace - we'll manage just fine here
with the Russians.' 'Ah, no problem.' And, by the way, 'let's agree, by the way,
that the next SACEUR won't be an American officer but a European officer.'
So it's more balanced, that whole transactional relationship, so we're not so
dependent on America. Then, in my opinion, it's on a healthier footing, and
we can pursue our own interests better too. And even if the goals then end up
leaning more toward Europe than over there in the States, we'd still manage fine. This
building process is no easy thing at all, because Europe is, after all,
quite the committee - dozens of countries with different interests. But
here it's clearly been noticed, over there in Brussels, that people have woken up
to the fact that something needs to be done about this now, we need to invest in it, we need to
be stronger, more independent, because we can't stay at the mercy of one,
one half-crazy American president in these matters, so
the will is starting to be found. So, in a way, from Trump's election there's always
something good to be found too, and the good part is that it shakes things up, it
forces Europe to grow up, without us always
holding our hands out for American help - instead we could say, well, we can handle it
ourselves too, because we have 45 million people, the world's third-
largest market, and a huge industrial power, innovation-
we have 30% - relative to population, we have 30% more, more
AI researchers than the US and China have. We have a lot of
the prerequisites to do these things quite well, really. Yeah, let's hope that indeed
after this shake-up Europe really does get back on its feet.
One more thing about this book - a good, good book, Pekka Toveri, on the war in Ukraine -
it'll probably sell very, very well, and it really does have this
documentary dimension to it, about the course of the war. And then also this kind of,
at least for people who've done their military service, a lot of interesting
war-technology description, and also this strategy, tactics and practical
military-operations analysis. So it's worth it, in my opinion, in my opinion,
buying or listening to it. Thank you for this
visit, Pekka Toveri, and let's suggest a short Sisäpiiri segment too - would that
work? I mean, I find this fascinating - now that you're there in the EU, there's
this taxonomy thing, and it's almost comical - it wasn't that long ago that in the taxonomy
war technology was frowned upon. And now, apparently, nothing is quite so fine
an industry as dual-use technology. So, basically,
technology that's also suited to defence or the arms industry
and also has some civilian use. So let's - let's talk about this
topic a bit more, briefly, over on the Sisäpiiri side. Would that work?