Map of Finland By Jniemenmaa – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Public intellectual Noah Smith provides a shrewd assessment as to how the invasion will end… with a hollow, temporary, partial win for Putin and a profound, long term, strategic victory for the noble Ukrainian people, “some form of Finlandization.”

Trump appears to be increasingly frustrated that Vladimir Putin isn’t playing along with the MAGA narrative. gun threatening to increase sanctions on Russia if no deal is reached:…

 

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Finland was … forced to make diplomatic concessions — in a “treaty of friendship” it signed with the Soviets in 1948, it promised to remain a neutral country and to resist any Western invasion of the USSR. This created the system known as “Finlandization”, in which Finland remained outside the Western orbit, but retained its independence and its democratic system.

And yet Finland was never absorbed into the Soviet Union. As time went on, its relationship with the West grew and deepened, and it drifted slowly away from the Soviet orbit. As of 2025 — 34 years after the Soviet Union fell — Finland is a rich, democratic, and fiercely independent nation. It’s also in NATO.

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If the Ukraine war ended like Finland’s wars, with territorial losses and promises not to join NATO, but with independence and democracy preserved, it will represent a tactical loss but a great strategic victory for Ukraine. ….

My bet is that Ukraine’s leaders have already thought along these lines. I predict that they’re probably ready to take the plunge and sign a deal of the type Trump is proposing, even though doing so could spell the end of their political careers. And because Putin almost certainly understands this historical parallel, he’s reluctant to make that deal — he knows it means that most of Ukraine will semi-permanently escape Russia’s orbit, fulfilling the dreams that Ukrainian nationalists have cherished for over 150 years. But if it’s a choice between that and a catastrophe in Russia, I think he might take the deal anyway.

Slava Ukraine!