Finland and Norway's leaders used their call with Putin last week to lay the ground for a Putin-Zelenskiy meeting, not to sit through the history lecture the Financial Times described.

The FT report that Putin spent much of the 90-minute conversation with Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store on October 27 talking about medieval history, appears to be a canard. Store denied it and asked the FT for a retraction, or at least a correction; the FT refused. 

The report also said that an immediate Ukraine war ceasefire was barely mentioned. Store denied that too. "That he gave a lecture on Slavic history is simply not correct," he said, adding that speaking time was shared roughly evenly.

A more sober analysis of the meeting by other observers is the call was designed as one step in a process meant to end in a face-to-face meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Since the initial round of reporting, it has been clarified that the Nordic leaders only requesting the call with the Kremlin after they had discussed their strategy with all of Kyiv, Washington and Brussels.  In the days since, Kyiv has said Zelenskiy is ready to discuss territory with Putin for the first time, while the Kremlin has said Europe will have to be involved in talks at some point, all of which suggests a step-by-step process is beign thrashed out by the warring parties.

Putin has blown hot and cold, offering concessions by saying he is "open" to meeting Zelenskiy, but at the same time, repeating that no ceasefire can be agreed until war's "root causes" are addressed. Zelenskiy has followed up with a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on November 1, who has been the key intermediator in attempts at peace so far, first with the Black Sea Grain Initiative  and the failed Istanbul peace deal in the first year of the war.

Stubb's version

The claim that Putin delivered a history lecture "is not true, so it is incorrect information", Stubb told Finnish public broadcaster Yle in an interview on October 31. Putin opened by setting out his view of events since 2014, "with a lot of familiar messages", Stubb said. "We were able to have, as it were, a normal conversation, which was very concrete."

The call was made at Ukraine's request and grew out of talks with the Americans and Ukrainians after the October 20 meeting in Oslo, where Stubb and Store hosted Zelenskiy and US envoy Steve Witkoff, with Jared Kushner joining remotely. "We consulted Ukraine and the Americans and got a green light from them," Stubb said. It was timed to come before the next round of three-way talks between Ukraine, Russia and the US in Abu Dhabi.

The aim of those talks is a meeting of the two presidents. "Hopefully Abu Dhabi produces the kind of results that would make Zelenskiy and Putin want to meet," Stubb said. Finland has no need of a seat at the table, he added, noting that naming a single European representative "seems to be quite difficult".

The two Nordic leaders carried two messages from Ukraine to Putin, a demand for a ceasefire and a proposal for a Zelenskiy-Putin meeting, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha told the Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat in an interview published on October 30. "We want this meeting, and we are ready for it," Sybiha said. "Zelensky is ready to discuss the most difficult and sensitive issues, including the territorial question."

"Our assessment is that the call was a step forward in our peace efforts," he added.

Europe at a later stage

The Kremlin has also made some consilatory gestures. "At some stage, yes, the involvement of Europeans will be required," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Russian news service Vesti on October 30, though he said nobody had yet discussed it in concrete terms and the Abu Dhabi round would stay three-way. That is an about face on the Kremlin's previously hard line on Brussels' invovlement. In May, Peskov ruled out talks with Europe on the grounds that it was a "party to the war."

Putin has given little away on substance: the Kremlin's readout of the call said peace was possible only if Russia's interests were fully taken into account, and Moscow still demands the whole of the Donetsk region. Zelenskiy has offered to freeze the front line, while Putin's offer at the Alaska summit in August 2025 was a freeze in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in exchange for Ukraine's withdrawal from Donetsk and Luhansk. There maybe some new wiggle room, but Putin is making it clear if there is, it is not much. 

Baltic de-escalation

The call was "the most constructive call with Putin since 2021", according to journalist Bojan Pancevski. "The key deliverable from the call was Baltic deescalation and a new, functional channel run by competent people, for a change, to support the Ukraine talks," he said in a post on X.

Freedom of navigation in the Baltic Sea, keeping sea lanes open and Russia's shadow fleet were discussed, and Finnish-Russian bilateral relations were not raised at all, according to Yle and the Finnish news agency STT. Both sides agreed to keep the line open. It was "the first time that Europe received a direct message from Russia on the war in Ukraine or, for example, on the situation in the Baltic Sea", Stubb told Yle.

Putin played good cop and bad cop when he spoke about the call at a press conference after the Russia-Africa summit in Moscow on October 29. "I know that criticism was later directed at them, but it is not for us to judge whether this is right or wrong. I believe it is right," he said, according to Interfax. "After all, there are people in Europe who do not want to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, as some do, but want to establish some kind of constructive dialogue."

The warning echoed the Kremlin’s longstanding insistence that Europe’s security arrangements must account for Russia’s demands.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has been an outstanding critic of the call and said she was "very sceptical about this independent initiative by Norway and Finland", a sign of how divided over Putin contacts Europe remains. Stubb told Yle that criticism was to be expected, and that Europeans share the same goal and differ only on how to reach it.

The elephant in the room

The call may also have opened a door to discussing Russia’s stated security concerns and Nato’s borders - a topic that has long been avoided for most of the conflict. A week earlier, Store had described the subject of their talks as the "European security structure", Julie Wilhelmsen, a professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) and one of Norway's leading Russia experts, said on NRK’s Dagsnytt 18 programme on October 27.

"As an observer, one has thought that one of the reasons Russia went to war was clearly to prevent closer ties between Ukraine and Nato," Wilhelmsen said. "Maybe we're actually going to discuss the big elephant in the room. Namely: How are we going to arrange this relationship with Nato expanding and coming closer to Russia's borders, and Russia saying they see it as a threat? How can we start talking about that?"

Many still contest the point, but for Putin, Ukraine is all about Russian security and the threat of Nato forces and weapons moving up to the Russian boarder across from the most densly populated part of European Russia.  Nato began expanding eastwards in 1999, when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined, the first of 16 countries to join the alliance since the end of the Cold War. Former Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted as much.

The Kremlin keeps pointing to the verbal promises made to Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 by US Secretary of State James Baker that should Germany reunite that Nato would  expand by “not one inch.” It is the reason why Russia insisted on an “iron-clad legally binding” agreement on no-Nato for Ukraine.

Putin sent Nato a draft treaty in the autumn of 2021 asking it to promise no more enlargement, and Nato did not sign it, Stoltenberg told the European Parliament in remarks on September 7, 2023. "So he went to war to prevent Nato, more Nato, close to his borders," he said.

Talk of Russia's security guarantees and a new security order for Europe is cover for the Kremlin's real aim of imposing its will on the West "through a redivision of the world and the creation of spheres of influence", according to Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who resigned in protest at the invasion in 2022.

A treaty Moscow has already written

A new pan-European security treaty is the way out, as IntelliNews has argued for more than a decade. Moscow has already put one on the table. Then-president Dmitry Medvedev launched the initiative on June 5, 2008, and the Kremlin published the draft European Security Treaty on November 29, 2009, sending it to governments and to Nato, the EU, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The West binned it unread. Its main provisions are:

• security that is "indivisible, equal and undiminished", with any measure taken by a party, including inside a military alliance, taken "with due regard to security interests of all other Parties";
• a ban on any party using its territory, or the territory of another, to prepare an armed attack on a third;
• the right of any party to ask another for information on measures that could affect its security;
• a three-step dispute mechanism of consultations, a Conference of the Parties and an Extraordinary Conference, with binding decisions;
• the right of each party to treat an armed attack on another party as an attack on itself;
• protection of existing alliance obligations and of every party's right to neutrality.

Putin has also made it extremely plain that he wants to revive the Cold War-era missile agreements, which came back on the agenda after his Alaska summit with US President Donald Trump on August 15, 2025. In his first week in office, US President Joe Biden and Putin agreed to extend New START for five years in January 2021, but the treaty expired on February 5, 2026 after Trump rejected Putin's offer of a voluntary extension, and talks on the next era of nuclear arms control have yet to start.

So there is common ground to start real security deal talks. Russia has said all along that it needs a security deal of its own, and Zelenskiy has for the first time opened the door to discussing Russia's security demands once the war ends and Ukraine's own protection is settled, he told the FT in an interview published on October 28.

A security deal was at the heart of the failed 2022 Istanbul peace deal, under which Ukraine would have become permanently neutral in exchange for guarantees from a group of states that included Russia. Drafts from April 2022 show Moscow insisted the guarantors could act only "on the basis of a decision agreed to by all guarantor states", which would have given Russia, the likely aggressor, a veto, while Kyiv held out for an individual obligation on each guarantor to come to its aid, according to Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko writing in Foreign Policy.

Finland has been here before

Europe is looking for someone to talk to Russia on its behalf, and Stubb is one of five leading candidates, alongside Czech President Petr Pavel, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Frederiksen and Store, The Telegraph reported on October 22. Asked whether Stubb could represent Europe, Sybiha said that was for EU leaders to decide, adding: "Why not?"

Stubb is Finnish, and when it comes to Russia, he knows what he is dealing with. Finland lost two wars to the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1944 and the deals it came to with the USSR mirror a possible Ukrainian resolution in form. Finland gave up about 12% of its territory. The 1947 Paris peace treaty capped the size of its armed forces, and the 1948 treaty with Moscow kept it out of military alliances, a neutrality that lasted until it joined Nato in 2023. Territory, neutrality and limits on the army are the terms Russia is now demanding of Ukraine, and Zelenskiy has rejected neutrality and army limits making a deal at the moment impossible.

A Finlandisation of Ukraine is one way to stop the war, and no one knows that history better than Stubb. "A small country has limited power. Power comes from having information," he told Yle. Stubb insists that Finland is not acting as a mediator and stands "100%" behind Ukraine, but qualified his remarks by saying there would have to be some sort of quid pro quo to halt the hostilites. But nobody outside the call knows whether the Finnish precedent came up. If the Nordic leaders did discuss something along those lines, Putin would have taken the call very seriously, as it ticks many of his boxes.

A new Yalta

Putin has proposed talks with Trump and Xi on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen on November 18-19. Putin sees the meeting as a new Yalta-style conference to divide the world into spheres of influence, a former Russian intelligence officer told The Wall Street Journal. "Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine, as my partners already said," Zelenskiy said on October 20, Ukrainska Pravda reported, borrowing the phrase Store used at their joint press conference in Oslo.

Before that come the Abu Dhabi talks, which Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov says will start no earlier than November 4. If they go well enough for Zelenskiy and Putin to agree to meet, the Nordic call dismissed as a history lesson will turn out to have been the first step.