Putin’s World War: Russia’s Covert Operations to Destroy the West

A highly topical book featuring horrifying true stories about the secret operations of Putin’s intelligence services

Russia is threatening the West with World War III, even though it has been waging it for years. As its weapons, the Kremlin uses agents of chaos, a covert operation, fake priests spreading hate speech, hackers recruited from prison, and the gullibility of people.

Jessikka Aro’s new non-fiction book about the Kremlin’s world war presents the secret operations of Putin’s intelligence services in detail.

The book takes the reader on a breath-taking journey from the lobby of the Helsinki Courts of Appeal to the controversial Bronze Soldier statue in Tallinn, from the media center run by the Russian military intelligence from Berlin to the Russian troll factory that operated in Ghana in West Africa.

Read if you dare.


Whale in a Glass Bowl

Join the journey of a whale and a woman and uncover the keys to sustainability – the Earth can be saved with tools of human behavioral biology. Humans are like a whale in a glass bowl, trapped despite our big brains.

Climate conferences and science studies, carbon caps and environmental education – sensible methods to halt the ecological crisis seem to have failed. Rational, collaborative and moralistic ways to prevent environmental destruction might seem like good ways to promote sustainability, but the equation breaks down once we notice that our species is not as rational, collaborative, and moralistic as one might wish. We are biological creatures with biological limitations, and without acknowledging those limitations, we are doomed to boil the planet and crush the biodiversity of our world.

In her new book, young researcher Maria Katajavuori sets out to uncover what’s wrong with our current Earth-saving approach – and how to fix it. She visits falling forests, melting glaciers, as well as preposterous scenes of environmental policymaking, and, on the way, illustrates the issues of our innate tendencies through latest science on human behavioral biology. Vivid examples of flying squirrels, migrating trout, African penguins, and numerous other species reveal the paradoxes of good intentions with bad outcomes. An encounter with a beluga, the white whale of the Arctic, provides a parable for humanity’s struggle: like the swimming of whales, behavior of humans is steered by our genome, and we are having hard time pushing against the destructive urges.

Yet, the beluga parable also provides us with the solution: the behavior of whales can be transformed by changing their surroundings, by shifting a small aquarium pool to an open ocean, and likewise, the behavior of humans can be transformed by changing our societal surroundings. If we fine tune our economic system and decision-making to fit the biology of our species, if we re-design taxation and democracy based on what we know about our evolutionary history, we can fight our destructive tendencies as well as harness the power of our positive tendencies, those of collaboration and prosociality. At the end of the day, all that is needed is to remember: we are no more or less than whales.


The Black Book of Football

A critical depiction of the destructive power of money in professional association football

During the 2000s, international association football has become a pompous, money-driven business. ‘The Beautiful Game’ has developed into a playing field with its own laws where oligarchs, sheikhs, and American billionaires run amok.

This startling book delves into the outrageously wealthy and powerful football clubs that do not abide by football’s own economic rules. Influential football bosses and governing bodies have become bogged down in bribe scandals, while small football countries like Finland have to count pennies.

The grotesque development culminates with the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, where the authorities and organizers do not care about costs or construction worker deaths.

Hannu Aaltonen and Tapio Keskitalo go and take a multifaceted approach in going through the corruption, money laundering, tax evasion, bribes, manipulation of scores and illegal betting present in the sport. [–] The two journalists are doing important work as they find out who stole from the fans and the players.

Tommi Liljedahl in Kulttuuritoimitus magazine


How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War, 1939-1950

A meticulously-researched insight into critical points in the history of relations between Finland and the Soviet Union

How did Finland evade Joseph Stalin’s crosshairs three times? Did Stalin have a special relationship with Finland and the Finns? Why didn’t he continue the Soviet onslaught on Finland during the Winter War in 1940? Why did the dictator back down from his aspirations and demands towards Finland during the peace negotiations in 1944? Why did 1948 remain the year of an unfulfilled coup in Finland? The answer lies in the relations between Finland and Russia which remain highly timely to this day.

Joseph Stalin has been one of the individuals with the most influence on the history of independent Finland. There are few who have made so many far-reaching decisions as Stalin: he decreed the beginning and the end of the Winter War, the Moscow Armistice of 1944 that ended the Continuation War was signed with his authorization, and when, in 1948, it was time to decide whether Finland would become a ‘people’s republic’ or not, he initially pushed forward but eventually backed down. All of these decisions can be seen as pivotal to the fate of Finland, its society, its independence, the life and death of the Finnish people.

The book focuses on the decisions of Stalin in which the entire existence or, at the very least, the essential nature of that existence, of Finland was at stake.