[qayxc]

> Putting both countries in a new list of 'very unfriendly countries'?

My best guess would be exactly that. The last thing Putin wants is a repeat of the Finno-Russian wars of 1917 and 1941, which resulted in catastrophic losses on the Soviet side.

[tovej]

You mean the war of the winter 1939-1940 and the 1941-1944 war.

1917-1922 was the Russian civil war and 1918 the Finnish civil war. IIRC, some of the White Finnish raiding parties ventured into Russia, and the Bolsheviks supported the Finnish Reds, but you can't really speak of Soviet losses, the Russian Soviet Republic was founded in 1917 and only gained power due to the civil war.

[qayxc]

During the Finnish Civil war, which ultimately ended in Finish independence, the White Finnish forces ended the Russian presence in Finland and Soviet (yes, Soviet) soldiers who fought on the side of the Finnish Red Guard left the country.

If you insist on nit-picking years, I only supplied the years of the start of the conflicts. You can go as far to include every border conflict, but that's completely besides the point. The forces that supported the Red Guard during the 1917-1918 war were all part of the Soviet forces in any case.

> the Russian Soviet Republic was founded in 1917 and only gained power due to the civil war.

They lost Finland and any influence on the country, which gained independence during that time, seeing that as "only gaining power" is a weird and twisted view on history.

[tovej]

Tsarist Russia/The Russian Soviet lost Finland, and Lenin acknowledged Finland's independence in 1917 before the Finnish civil war (in the hopes that the revolution would spread internationally and bring Finland and others back into the fold). So I take issue with the claim that it was the war that caused Lenin to lose Finland.

The Bolsheviks and their Red army (not the Soviets, the Soviet Union itself was not founded until 1922) supported the Reds, but the boots on the ground were Finnish both for the Reds and the Whites, with German boots being decisively added in the landing at Hanko.

The war was not a war for independence, but a war born out of the circumstances of the breakdown of Tsarist Russia, a famine, a lack of police force, and a general dissatisfaction among the working class, largely fueled by ideas from the Russian revolution of course.

>If you insist on nit-picking years, I only supplied the years of the start of the conflicts.

1941 was not the start of the conflict, it was the second in a series of two wars. The entire interbellum time was used by both sides to prepare for further conflict. It is not a nitpick to say that Finland was involved in the winter war (1939-1940) and the continuation war (1941-1944), these are the two main wars that Finland was involved in during the second world war (the third most important one being the Lapland war against Germany).

1918 was an incredibly short civil war that caused no direct losses to the Bolsheviks, except that a Red government would have been sympathetic to the USSR and possibly joined it.

On a more general note, using terms like "twisted view of history" is not a sign of a good-faith discussion, be civil.