Trump on the Ukraine War: A Finnish General's Assessment | Pekka Toveri

Summary

Pekka Toveri assesses the capabilities of the Ukrainian and Finnish defence forces and, together with Sami, walks through the main events of the war in Ukraine via his book on the war (Docendo, 2025), drawing on five earlier long-form Toveri analyses of the war on the Neuvottelija channel. The episode was filmed the day before Volodymyr Zelensky and Keir Starmer met Donald Trump and JD Vance; the pessimistic view — that a quick peace deal riding along as an add-on to a minerals agreement was unlikely — proved correct, and US foreign policy has turned cold. What are Ukraine’s prospects? How is Europe arming against the Russian threat through NATO and the EU? What are Finland’s key capabilities in defending against Russia, and do corvettes secure Finnish maritime logistics?

Transcript

English transcript derived from validated English subtitles (WebVTT · SRT). Timestamps link to the original video.

00:00 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 And this will probably go out of date the moment it’s in your hands.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

01:02 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

02:04 ‘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

03:07 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

04:08 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

05:09 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

06:13 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

07:14 - 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,

08:14 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

09:15 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,

10:15 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

11:16 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

12:18 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

13:20 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

14:24 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

15:27 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,

16:30 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

17:31 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,

18:35 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

19:36 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

20:40 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

21:42 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

22:44 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

23:46 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

24:50 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

25:54 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,

26:55 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

27:59 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

29:03 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,

30:04 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.

31:06 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

32:10 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

33:13 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,

34:15 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

35:16 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

36:18 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

37:23 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.

38:27 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

39:28 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

40:30 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

41:33 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

42:36 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

43:38 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

44:38 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

45:40 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

46:42 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

47:45 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

48:48 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

49:50 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

50:51 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

51:55 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

52:57 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

53:59 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

55:00 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

56:02 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

57:05 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

58:08 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

59:11 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?