Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

Here's a much better article from the Finnish public broadcaster giving more context: https://yle.fi/a/74-20161606

My comments:

The important thing to note that at this point it's just a political posturing and an announcement of intent. They haven't shown any concrete technical plan how this would actually be executed.

> "Of course, we are very pragmatic and realistic, we cannot do this in five years. Planning will continue until the end of the decade, and maybe in 2032 we can start construction."

Once they have the cost estimates and effects on existing rail traffic studied, I bet construction will never start.

Fear of a foreign invasion by a country much larger than your, and one that occupied you once for 200 years and attacked you again just 20 years after independence tends to clear the mind.

Fear of foreign invasion is also why the Soviet Union invaded during the Winter War ("Greater Finland" irredentism was a thing, and St Petersburg was militarily exposed).

Fear is why Finland allied with the Nazis.

Fear is why the Soviet Union also signed a pact with the Nazis and invaded Ukraine.

It's easy to justify anything with fear.

One is the biggest country on the planet, with 150 million people.

The other one is about 300 sqkm with 5 million people.

When in doubt, use basic logic.

Your argument is the same as Iraq being a realistic threat against the US.

Also, list of Russian neighbors not threatened or invaded by Russia:

Belarus (pushed into a sort of union state)

China (too big)

Japan (I think)

Mongolia (I think)

Azerbaijan (I think)

List of neighbors threatened or invaded by Russia:

Ukraine

Georgia

Moldova (Transnistria occupied since 1991)

Estonia

Latvia

Lithuania

Finland

Poland

>Your argument is the same as Iraq being a realistic threat against the US.

Your argument appears to be that your enemy's fear driven by losing 27 million people during an invasion/war of extermination is exactly equivalent to your country's fear of weapons that were imagined solely for the purposes of justifying an invasion.

My argument was that it is quite easy to get a domestic population to treat all of the enemy's legitimate fears as utterly irrelevant while treating bullshit domestic fears as existential.

In a way I think you helped make this point for me by forgetting about those 27 million deaths.

It's such a mystery why all neighbours of Russia hate Russia and Russians.

If only there was a reason for this.