Podcast · Viikon viisasteluklubi Ukraina-spesiaali · 2022-02-25 · 52:06 · In Finnish
Ukraine Special — Sami Miettinen on Ivan Puopolo's Viisasteluklubi
Published as “Viikon viisasteluklubi / Ukraina-spesiaali / Miettinen-Sammallahti-Puopolo”
Hosted by: Ivan Puopolo
▶ Watch on Viikon viisasteluklubi
Sami Miettinen joined Viikon viisasteluklubi — Ivan Puopolo’s panel, with Tere Sammallahti as the third regular — on 25 February 2022, the day after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. It is a contemporaneous record rather than a retrospective, and reads as one: the participants are working out what has just happened while it is still happening.
The military reading holds up reasonably well against what followed. Ukraine is not a small country at 43 million people, but its materiel is dated and its air defence weak — which makes it genuinely strange, Sami argues, that Russia went in without establishing air supremacy first. Belarus turned out to be the piece of luck Putin needed, giving him a staging ground he did not have before. A Spetsnaz strike on an airfield was repelled and the field retaken. The panel’s conclusion is that the outcome is not obvious at all; the open questions are how long it takes, and whether it hurts ordinary Russians enough to matter politically.
On sanctions the argument is impatient with the choice being framed as a choice. If excluding Russia from SWIFT bites and targeted bank sanctions bite, why pick one? Nord Stream 2 being halted draws an aside that Paavo Lipponen might now concede the project was a mistake. And on Finland, the panel is blunt about a defence minister who could not say whether readiness had been raised, and about a debate in which one party held an official NATO position. The counter-argument they keep returning to is that Finland already has the most NATO-compatible equipment anywhere and a defence budget larger than several member states — everything except the treaty, and a very long border with the country doing the invading.
The last third turns to information and money: Russia forcing an Estonian operator to take down a page, a state too poor to build a working information dictatorship, whether the Russian-speaking minority in Finland becomes a target for misplaced anger, and whether a 40–50% index drop is a buying opportunity. It closes on Jokerit and the KHL.
Chapters
- 00:00 — Why this week’s episode is a different kind of special
- 03:00 — Ukraine’s size and materiel; Belarus as the staging ground
- 06:00 — The airfield strike repelled; how long, and does it hurt Russians
- 09:00 — EU statements versus what Putin actually weighs; Nord Stream 2 halted
- 12:00 — SWIFT exclusion or targeted bank sanctions — why choose
- 15:00 — Finnish readiness, and a defence minister who would not answer
- 18:00 — NATO-compatible equipment, the budget, and the border
- 21:00 — Putin’s shifting justifications: denazification or NATO enlargement
- 24:00 — Donbas: human-rights violations, and what “genocide” is being made to mean
- 27:00 — Not self-restricting at the border; the parties and the NATO debate
- 30:00 — Case-by-case assessment, and asking everyone to drop the old positions
- 33:00 — Belarus has no options; Xi taking notes on how annexation goes
- 36:00 — Russia forces an Estonian operator to remove a page; VPNs and a leaky censor
- 39:00 — The Russian-speaking minority in Finland, and misplaced anger
- 42:00 — Markets: a 40–50% drop, buying the dip, and the bounce-back
- 45:00 — Does social media matter? Parties and multinationals act on it
- 48:00 — Jokerit, the KHL and who owns the brand
- 51:00 — Should politicians block a hockey team; closing
The recording lives on Ivan Puopolo’s own channel and he owns it. This page is a record of the appearance and a pointer to the original, not a copy of it. The chapter titles above are derived from the recording; the episode carries no published chapter marks of its own.
Both of the other participants have appeared on the Neuvottelija channel: Ivan Puopolo in Sanna Marin’s darkening clouds and Tere Sammallahti in Taxation, the Laffer curve and Libera.
From the same session: Neuvottelija's own episode
Topics: Geopolitics · Finnish Economy & Policy · Free Speech & Society · ← All media visits · Talks & Events · Markdown mirror: index.md