Finland. Continuation War. The Finnish Prime Minister flies back to Stalin in Moscow, as he had done a few years earlier for the Winter War. The Soviet demands are almost the same as in 1941: they retake Karelia and the naval base, and the nickel mines in the north. The third Finnish-Soviet conflict in less than a quarter of a century ends. The Soviets fail to conquer Finland, as they did with the other Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. From now on, Finland will have to adopt extreme realpolitik to deal with the irascible and cumbersome Soviet enemy. Freedom of the press, for example, when discussing the Soviet Union, will be limited. Finland will not join NATO and will join the EU very late, and only after the USSR has collapsed, and only by promising Russia equal economic conditions with its European partners. The Finns learned the hard way that other “friendly” countries cannot be trusted (in fact, they even received a declaration of war from the English, albeit a bogus one), and that they had to go it alone.
