80 years ago:

#OTD in 1939 the Red Army fired the first shots of the #WinterWar. In a typical Russian fashion the artillery shots were fired at their own border outpost in the Village of #Mainila.These shots and their alleged casualties were used as a Casus Belli against 🇫🇮.#WinterWar80 pic.twitter.com/oIsKJ8L3NN

— Petri Mäkelä (@pmakela1) November 26, 2019

The Finns put up a hell of a fight, inflicting a monstrous 250,000 casualties on the Soviets but they finally had to agree to an unfavorable armistice after 4 months. A little over a year later, they made the fateful decision to join Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in an effort to recoup their losses.