[burmanm]

Far easier is to just destroy the train tracks with explosives that connect between Finland and Russia (or demolish them like done in Salla after letting them rot).

There's no defensive reason for this other than in the cabinet talks.

[thehappypm]

False.

First of all it's not just so easy to destroy infrastructure in a way that can't be rebuilt quickly; thousands of miles of train tracks would be difficult to destroy. This is happening all over Ukraine.

Second, blowing up your own country's rail infrastructure means you can't use it, either, which means you lose an advantage you have that your trains can move on your rails but your enemy's cannot.

[burmanm]

If you look at the map you will see that there isn't multiple tracks coming from Russia to Finland. Some of them were even designed to be blown up if necessary (such as the Salla rail tracks).

Finnish rail roads are mostly north-south bound (or west of Helsinki) which are not helpful to Russian advances. The only way for them to transport weaponry would be through east-west bound (near the border) and there isn't many. It's easy to take such out and they would not impact our infrastructure at all as they're not heavily used (if at all since eastern part of Finland is economically the weakest link anyway).

It's quick and easy in the end to destroy. Rebuilding them under artillery fire isn't easy.

[citrin_ru]

Bridges are hard to rebuild quickly and they can be destroyed using glide bombs and cruise missiles. Ukraine struggles to do this because has very small air force and don't have enough tools to sufficiently suppress Russian air defence. NATO air force is stronger and can in theory acheive air superiority.

[inglor_cz]

IIRC Russian army had, prior to the outbreak of the current war, several tens of thousands of soldiers specialized just in emergency railway construction and repairs. IDK how many remain now.

Russians aren't stupid, they know that the enemy will try to destroy the tracks when retreating, so they train to fix/bypass the problems quickly.

That includes some transportable improvised bridges ready for deployment.

[dh2022]

Far easier to re-build a few miles of tracks destroyed at the border then to re-gauge hundreds of miles of tracks....