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Since Finland and Sweden hold important strategic locations in the Baltic/Arctic area (northern Finnish Lapland and Åland in case of Finland, Gotland in case of Sweden) that Russia might wish to control in the event of a wider NATO/Russia conflict.
Even if we assume that Russia would actually engage in a direct conventional war against NATO (which continues seeming very far-fetched to me), and somehow could magically summon the manpower and materiel for such an undertaking, I don't see what benefits it would gain from expending its resources (which would presumably still be finite, even if we assume for the sake of argument they are ~10x what they have now) on such an undertaking. The Ukraine war clearly shows that naval area denial currently has the upper hand in a near-peer conflict, so all major surface combatants would be disabled or pinned in port within a few weeks of the beginning of such a war; and with anti-ship missiles taking some one-digit number of minutes to strike a target, an Incheon-style landing around Warsaw would be as unrealistic to stage from Åland as it would be to stage from Kronstadt (or more so, since it would be harder to get an air defense umbrella even over the staging area).
The obvious strategy for Russia to pursue if it for some reason decided to fight a conventional do-or-die war against NATO on the offensive would be to seize the Baltics and then try to ram through the Suwałki gap as in Cold War planning scenarios. They didn't attack Sweden in WWII either, when it still would have made more sense (as naval action had not yet been rendered quite as impossible by modern reconnaissance and targeting) and they had a bigger and better army; and even their action against Finland was decidedly half-hearted, seemingly only serving to loosen the Finnish chokehold on Leningrad's northern supply lines that gave them trouble during the first half of the war. (As much as it may be flattering to you, it seems implausible that they would have been unable to make it past Vainikkala after fighting their way through to Berlin, if they actually were equally motivated.)
It seems pretty clear to me that the Åland/Gotland explanation was advanced by politicians who had personal incentives to make your respective countries join NATO, and lapped up by a media and population eager to see themselves personally involved on the right side in a conflict that they perceived as just (much like in religious apocalyptic fiction in the vein of Left Behind, the devil always takes very specific personal interest in the author's/reader's country and people).
You've mixed up two gaps.
The Suwałki gap is a post-Cold War thing. When the USSR existed, Lithuania was a constituent part of it. And theoretical NATO-fighting Russia would have to secure it before seizing the rest of the Baltics, to prevent Poland from counterattacking.
The Fulda gap was the one from the Cold War, but it's in the middle of Germany right now. It was considered the only suitable place for a large mechanized offensive against NATO.
Blech, I was half asleep when writing that post. I did indeed mean the Polish gap as the one they would ram through, but you are totally right about the Cold War one.
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Whuh? Warsaw? Do you mean Gdansk?
Sure, you wouldn't get landings like this, but controlling the Baltic (or, even more importantly, preventing NATO control of Baltic) would still give Russians considerable strategic advantage, starting with the security of Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. The Arctic circle even moreso - that's where the big missiles would be flying, after all.
If we're talking about 1944, we're talking about a completely different situation due to there already having been 3 years of war. And Winter War was precisely the sort of an invasion of a neutral country to obtain a strategic advantage in the midst of an ongoing separate greater-power conflict we are talking about here.
The scenarios that I described wasn't concocted in 2022 - they've been standard fare in Finnish and Swedish security debates from the times of Cold War on, a part of a greater security calculus of whether it makes more sense to join NATO and risk getting directly involved a great-power conflict or not join the NATO and still risk being targeted by a separate SMO in preparation of such a conflict or as a separate but still connected part of such a conflict.
For a long time, that calculus pointed towards the "not join" option, with majorities of both the population and the leadership of these countries sharing this view, but a full Russian attack on Ukraine of course upended the calculus almost completely (the year of Russia beating the war drum before the invasion had already started this process but the invasion made the opinion switch permanent) by demonstrating Russia's capacity for brash, previously unthinkable action, with both the people and the leaders basically changing course almost overnight. I live here and follow local politics closely, I am very familiar with how this process happened.
Whoops, yes, my bad. Another instance of posting while half asleep.
Kaliningrad would be better secured by seizing Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania (which would also be significantly easier), and if Sweden and Finland remained neutral then NATO would be hardly "in control" of the Baltic at that point. Even then, though, I figure they would still be perfectly capable of knocking out any major ship in it, which would render it essentially useless (especially since in an open war against NATO I imagine even "civilian" shipping would be targeted - the taboo against that is only maintained by Western public opinion and the implicit threat of the collective West taking its gloves off if a violation is too egregious, which would not work if Western gloves are already off and would not be aimed against the West itself to begin with). As for the Arctic circle, why is Sweden and Finland relevant here? Russia extends further north than either; the only clay that would meaningfully extend its northern/northwestern reach is Norway's, and that's already in NATO.
I was thinking of the 41-44 war after the siege of Leningrad. I don't think being different means that it's not applicable; the Soviet war machine was only gaining steam, and Soviet planners were clearly already thinking about a future standoff against the West, so I don't understand why they would not invest more resources in it if they actually thought it strategically advantageous for such a scenario. As for the original Winter war, I think circumstances then were actually materially different to modern ones: the Finnish border was significantly closer to Leningrad, between Mannerheim's White sympathies and Finnish irredentism towards the Russian parts of Karelia a proactive/opportunistic attack by the Finns on Russia would have seemed plausible, and there was an ideological component about Finland's abortive communist revolution that is wholly absent today.
The scenarios you described might have been more relevant during the Cold War and into the mid-2000s, when the consensus among the major militaries of the world was still that littoral combat and naval landings are a winning strategy against great powers. (The US started its Zumwalt-class littoral destroyer programme somewhen around 2005, I think?) I remember hearing the first rumblings that A2/AD may render all of this obsolete in the 2010s in the context of China, and the the Ukraine war has now delivered fairly compelling proof.
I mean, I actually lived in Sweden around the time of the 2022 invasion, and though I was not so rooted that I would be familiar with what average locals had thought before, within my academic bubble the sequence looked like (moral outrage at the invasion) -> (media blitz pushing the message that Sweden is also threatened) -> (skepticism gradually making way for socially backed belief that it is obviously so). For a few months in 2022, there would be almost non-stop charm offensives with US navy ships visiting Stockholm for photo-ops every other month and what-not as well; all in all it hardly read as a purely organic, bottom-up sentiment.
In general, the notion that Russia invading Ukraine was "brash, previously unthinkable action" itself seems to be a psyop to me. The writing was on the wall for a long time - Ukraine's pro-Western elements stood out as Russia's public external enemy number one not even just since the Donbass conflict or the 2014 revolution, but for several years before that as Russia accused Ukraine of stealing gas in transit while also threatening them with the possibility of cutting off their ability to export gas westward entirely, while colluding with the Baltics to interfere with any project to build new pipelines that would allow them to bypass Ukraine entirely. (Western media either mokusatsued this or at most reported on it with "Russia blackmailing Ukraine with gas"/"Russia unreliable in delivering gas to the West" framing.) The frequently repeated assertion that the invasion of Ukraine was unexpected/unpremeditated seems to mostly serve as a catechism to reinforce non-acknowledgement of this background, as Western governments are concerned that this would legitimize the invasion in the eyes of some of their population and thereby sap internal support.
Without the resentment and often downright seething towards Ukraine in the population, it seems inconceivable from a Russian perspective that the invasion would have gone through. More generally, I think the West still underestimates to what extent modern Russian foreign policy is based not on rationally optimising for some complex future goal, but purely on a calculus of rewarding allies and especially taking revenge for perceived slights. We can even see this in the context of smaller decisions within the war itself - Russia only started targeting Ukrainian power infrastructure as a response to the Crimean bridge bombing, and the strikes were actually referred to in official media as "strikes of revenge". Despite their effectiveness they basically ceased as the thirst for revenge was sated, much to the consternation of many milbloggers and armchair generals (some of whom were annoyed because the strikes were effective, and others because they felt that this was not enough revenge yet). Another volley of strikes came recently only as revenge for US deep strike authorisation. There are several other steps that would have been no-brainers if winning the war were actually the goal, such as deep strikes against bridges across the Dniepr; I can only surmise that they are being held back to have a topical target for revenge if the Ukrainians were to actually destroy the Crimean bridge, and despite their sabre-rattling the Ukrainians actually understand this and that is why it still stands. The thing is, even now, Russian resentment towards Finland and Sweden is basically negligible, and the two countries actually enjoy tremendous goodwill among the population. There might be some argument (even though, as I said, I think it is weak) that Russia would attack them if it actually operated under a goal-oriented framework to defeat the West; there is really no case to be made that Russia would attack them if it operates under the "prison social hierarchy" framework that I think actually drives them. (The Baltics, on the other hand, have done their utmost to actually be in danger now. Russia still isn't so irrational as to attack them without being prepared for a full-blown world war, but I would at least expect that in a putative nuclear standoff they have many more warheads set aside for them than would be warranted by their military significance.)
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