NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reiterated on Sunday [June 13] that the war in Ukraine can only be ended at the negotiating table. Any peace agreement also requires compromises, Stoltenberg said. Also in terms of territory.
Stoltenberg made the remarks at the annual Kultaranta talks [with the Finnish President Niinistö] in Finland. The West is also willing to "pay a price" for strengthening Ukraine's military, the chairman of the transatlantic defense alliance said. But Kiev will have to make some territorial concessions to Moscow to end the conflict, he said.
Peace comes at a price, Stoltenberg said, "Peace is possible. The only question is: What price are the Ukrainians willing to pay for peace? How much territory, how much independence, how much sovereignty are they willing to sacrifice for peace?"
Stoltenberg did not present any concrete proposals from NATO on how to end the conflict. He said it was "up to those who pay the highest price to make that decision". NATO and the West would continue to supply arms to the Ukrainians to "strengthen their hand" when a solution is eventually negotiated, he said.
In doing so, Stoltenberg also mentioned Finland, which ceded Karelia to the Soviet Union as part of a peace agreement during World War II. Stoltenberg called the Finnish-Soviet agreement "one of the reasons why Finland was able to emerge from World War II as an independent, sovereign nation".
Source is Blick, a somewhat special Swiss newspaper, trashy, but like on the topic of the pandemic with excellent live ticker on the war in Ukraine and even news in Ukrainian for the approximately 50,000 refugees in Switzerland. Helsingin Sanomat, the largest Finnish daily newspaper, was not very informative on this topic.
The Finnish peace treaty with the Soviet Union and the Finno-Soviet Treaty, "Agreement on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance", of 1948 as an option for possible negotiated solutions for Ukraine?
In the Winter War of 1939-1940, Finland had lost Petsamo at the northernmost point of the country, its only year-round ice-free port on the Arctic Ocean, smaller areas on its eastern border, and the Karelian isthmus northwest of Leningrad. Finnish icebreakers operated only in the south of the Baltic Sea at that time.
In the Continuation War of 1941-1944, Finland had lost Karelia but was never Soviet occupied when the Red Army had more important goals, except for a troop base on the Porkkala peninsula until 1956, on Finland's southern coast. When the war ended, some 430 000 Karelian immigrants had to be settled in the remaining Finland with just under four million inhabitants.
In 1948, at the time of the Soviets' takeover of Czechoslovakia, there was also an attempted coup in Finland by the Communist Party of Finland.
Until the fall of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki was a major political player, called "Tehtaankatu”, named after the seat of the embassy, and the term "Finlandization" appears prominently again in Dugin's Geopolitics:
The basic formula for analyzing the geopolitics of the "Russian West" is the principle: "European Europe, Russian Russia". Here, in general, one should act in the same way as in the case of the Islamic world, new borders are inevitable, some regions should be divided again, but in all cases the main task remains to create friendly neutral entities in the West, with maximum ethnocultural, economic and social freedom but with strategic dependence on Moscow. The task is to "Finlandize" the whole of Europe as much as possible, but one must begin with the reorganization of the spaces immediately adjacent directly to Russia.
Conclusion: Stoltenberg is ill-informed on this matter and Finland does not set an example of how real independence can be achieved in a foreseeable time frame through territorial cessions.