Who Would Win a Battle Between the Nordics and Russia?

Assuming Russia attacked and Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland all stood united with no nukes involved

Erik Engheim
12 min readFeb 8

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I saw this kind of silly hypothetical question on Quora and thought it would be fun to speculate and compare. Russia has some obvious numerical advantages. The whole Nordic region only counts 27.36 million people, which is much smaller than the population of Ukraine of 43.79 million people. In comparison, Russia is huge, with 143.4 million people.

However, one important thing people often forget is that it was the Soviet Union and not Russia which invaded Finland during the Winter war. At the time, the USSR counted a population of 194 million people, while Finland counted 3.5 million. Finland today is not only more populous, but also richer. Russia in contrast is a shadow of the Soviet Union with a much smaller population and many problems with their military forces.

Economic Power

If you look at size of economies, the picture change quite a lot. The Nordic region packs a heavy punch, with a combined economy of $1.6 trillion. In other words, the Nordic economy is bigger than the Russia economy of $1.42 trillion. This is worth keeping in mind when looking at the Russian attack on Ukraine. They are attacking a country which not only has a much smaller population, but also a significantly smaller economy.

Finland alone has an economy two and a half times bigger than Ukraine. This matters because remember that a lot of the challenge for Ukraine today is not merely having enough soldiers, but having enough advanced equipment to fight with. Money matters. Nordic countries would have the deep pockets needed to purchase huge amounts of advance equipment. Norway has the enormous oil fund owning 1.5 percent of the world, which could be used to finance massive weapons purchases leading up to a war and during war.

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Erik Engheim

Geek dad, living in Oslo, Norway with passion for UX, Julia programming, science, teaching, reading and writing.