As brave Ukrainians take up arms against the invading Russian colossus, it's hard to conceive of Vladimir Putin losing.

With 900,000 troops, vastly superior air power, and nuclear weapons, Russia's military might appears to be overwhelming. Ukraine has just over 200,000 soldiers and more than 100,000 border guards and National Guard members—a fraction of what Russia can muster if it started calling up reservists.

Ukraine's military expenditures in 2020 were just a tenth of Russia's, according to Reuters. The international news agency cited one report that Russia has more three times as many battle tanks.

But there was another military conflict with one of Russia's smaller neighbours more than 80 years ago in which David actually managed to beat back Goliath.

That was the Winter War, also known as the First Soviet-Finnish War. That's when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered troops to invade after the Finns refused to accede to demands from Moscow.

"At the time that war broke out on November 30, 1939, the details of this absurd mismatch were as follows," wrote Jared Diamond in his 2019 bestseller Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. "The Soviet Union had a population of 170 million, compared to Finland's population of 3,700,000. The Soviet Union attacked Finland with 'only' four of its armies, totaling 500,000 men, and keeping many other armies in reserve for other military purposes."

Finland mounted a defence with its entire army of nine divisions and 120,000 men, wrote Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"The Soviet Union supported its attacking infantry with thousands of tanks, modern war planes, and modern artillery; Finland was almost without tanks, modern war planes, modern artillery, anti-tank guns, and anti-aircraft defences," Diamond continued.

"Worst of all, though, though the Finnish army did have good rifles and machine guns, it had very limited stocks of ammunition; soldiers were told to save ammunition by holding fire until Soviet attackers were close."

Yet the Finns fought off the Soviets for months. They blew up many enemy tanks with the help of "Molotov cocktails", so named for the Russian foreign minister at the time.

"Why did the Finnish army prevail for so long in defending itself against the Soviet army's overwhelming advantages of numbers and of equipment?" Diamond asked. "One reason was motivation: Finnish soldiers understood that they were fighting for their families, their country, and their independence, and they were willing to die for those goals."

The Finns' courage inspired 12,000 foreign volunteers, many from Sweden, to join the fight.

As Soviet casualties mounted, Stalin dropped support for the puppet regime that he had set up under a Finnish communist leader. The Soviet dictator then began negotiations. The Finns ended up ceding about nine percent of their territory to remain a free country.

Most of the province of Karelia and another area up north were turned over to Russia. The Karelians abandoned their homes and moved to other areas of Finland, where they were taken in by the Finns.

"Why, in March 1940, did Stalin not order the Soviet army to keep advancing and to occupy all of Finland?" Diamond asked in Upheaval. "One reason was that the fierce Finnish resistance had made clear that a further advance would continue to be slow and painful and costly to the Soviet Union, which now had much bigger problems to deal with—namely, the problems of reorganizing its army and re-arming to prepare for a German attack."

In the end,  Diamond reported, eight Soviet soldiers died for every Finn who was killed in the Winter War.

It's something to keep in mind as we watch the much smaller Ukrainian army and population take on the Russians. The odds are certainly against Ukraine, but as Vietnamese revolutionary and politician Ho Chi Minh once said: "You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win."

The Soviets launched the war in 1939 because the Finnish border was only 32 kilometres from the major port city of Leningrad, now known as Saint Petersburg.

By extending their footprint deeper into Finland—or by taking over the entire country—they could better protect Leningrad from any land-based invasion through Finland.

Coincidentally, this is the same city where Putin was born in 1952. That makes him 69 years old. 

Here's another coincidence: that's the same age that the murderous Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi died as vilified figures in world history.