3 months, Winter '39-'40. 126,875–167,976 Soviet dead or missing, 188,671–207,538 wounded or sick. [Colorized]

"Before the war, Soviet leadership had expected total victory within a few weeks. The Red Army had just completed the invasion of eastern Poland at a cost of fewer than 4,000 casualties after Germany attacked Poland from the west. Stalin's expectations of a quick Soviet triumph were backed up by politician Andrei Zhdanov and military strategist Kliment Voroshilov, but other generals were more reserved."

No, no, those other generals have a point

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation_War

That said, we don't talk about the Continuation War ("Second Soviet-Finnish War") when the Finns collaborated with the Nazis against what was, by then, an Allied Power.

Winter War is a much better story

Continuation War because "But wait, there's more!"
hopefully the current tensions don't cause a continuation Continuation War lol

seriously though from what I've heard the Finns don't even want Karelia back because years of Soviet rule have so utterly devastated the place so much that modern-day Vyborg is less developed than 1940's Viipuri.

Amazing the amount of human cannon fodder Russia will throw at an objective for the result of a few square miles of land.

I mean, Vyborg looks pleasant enough, but not "~1 million dead, missing, sick, or wounded" pleasant.

You know, I was watching a video on this. St. Petersburg, which was at one time the Russian Empire's capital, does lie uncomfortably close to the Finnish border.

In theory, a hostile neighbor could pour troops through that border and capture St. Petersburg quickly. A strategic self-defense perspective from Moscow's viewpoint does kind of have a point there.

But at the same time, what gets overlooked by Russian strategists is how they can achieve all their same defense objectives by just... being a nice neighbor. Boring, but that's how pretty much all the European countries have learned to get along nowadays, Balkans excepted.

Other point: All of Canada's major population centers are just a few miles from the U.S.'s northern border, but ever since the British Empire's dissolution, it's never been considered in any serious danger from America.

Sweden and Finland's imminent accession to NATO (prompted by, of course, the Ukraine War) really puts Russia's balls in a vice up in the north. Well, too bad. If at any point Russia forsakes its imperial ambitions in Europe and decides to choose the modernizing path of peace, human rights, and democratization, then one day the door to NATO admission will be open to them as well.

To be fair, St. Petersburg has about as many people as Finland itself, so it's not under that much threat... or rather, it wasn't.
Finland on it's own would be very unlikely to threaten St. Petersburg, but if it were to ally with a foreign power (which is what it's doing right now) they could Finland's geographical position could allow them to threaten Russia's second-largest city and flank Russia to the north.
To make matters worse, St. Petersburg is Putin's hometown.

It would be absolute madness to invade any country with nuclear weapons. Particularly one the size of Russia. Even tiny Israel, besieged on all sides by Arab rivals, has never been invaded since it has had nukes.

The disastrous Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that even a country the size of Iran is essentially impervious to invasion, with or without having nuclear weapons. So the idea Russia (spanning 11 timezones if I remember correctly, and with 140 million people) would ever be invaded by the collection of peace-loving democracies that constitute NATO is sheer folly.

It’s all warmed-over Soviet and WWII nostalgia. Embarrassing how little Russia has evolved since then. Putin really is turning it into a Giant North Korea.