![]() ![]() ![]() They blew up many enemy tanks with the help of "Molotov cocktails", so named for the Russian foreign minister at the time. ![]() Yet the Finns fought off the Soviets for months. "Worst of all, though, though the Finnish army did have good rifles and machine guns, it had very limited stocks of ammunition soldiers were told to save ammunition by holding fire until Soviet attackers were close." "The Soviet Union supported its attacking infantry with thousands of tanks, modern war planes, and modern artillery Finland was almost without tanks, modern war planes, modern artillery, anti-tank guns, and anti-aircraft defences," Diamond continued. The Soviet Union attacked Finland with 'only' four of its armies, totaling 500,000 men, and keeping many other armies in reserve for other military purposes."įinland mounted a defence with its entire army of nine divisions and 120,000 men, wrote Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The Soviet Union had a population of 170 million, compared to Finland's population of 3,700,000. "At the time that war broke out on November 30, 1939, the details of this absurd mismatch were as follows," wrote Jared Diamond in his 2019 bestseller Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. That's when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered troops to invade after the Finns refused to accede to demands from Moscow. That was the Winter War, also known as the First Soviet-Finnish War. The international news agency cited one report that Russia has more three times as many battle tanks.īut there was another military conflict with one of Russia's smaller neighbours more than 80 years ago in which David actually managed to beat back Goliath. Ukraine's military expenditures in 2020 were just a tenth of Russia's, according to Reuters. Ukraine has just over 200,000 soldiers and more than 100,000 border guards and National Guard members-a fraction of what Russia can muster if it started calling up reservists. With 900,000 troops, vastly superior air power, and nuclear weapons, Russia's military might appears to be overwhelming. As brave Ukrainians take up arms against the invading Russian colossus, it's hard to conceive of Vladimir Putin losing. ![]()
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