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Well, if it's so simple, why not have another crack at Leningrad? Why not send whole brigades, kit and all, to fight in Ukraine? That would kill a lot of Russian soldiers. The real answer is that he knows perfectly well Finland would suffer severely if they attacked Russia. Clearly killing Russians is not the solution to everything.
The previous guy in that role got kicked out of the job for being insufficiently careful in his wording, apparently suggesting that Ukraine wasn't going to join NATO. I thought that was the official story, that Russia invading Ukraine was bad in part because Ukraine certainly wasn't going to join NATO anyway, at least in the short term. I suppose the lesson people learnt from that is that one should err on the side of being anti-Russian for political gain, regardless of how this might impair diplomacy. How exactly do we plan to negotiate with people we've spent our time decrying as subhuman? Might former Axis allies calling Russians subhuman not be counterproductive, providing grist for their propaganda mills?
Most European countries are rich and cowardly and currently at low risk, to the first approximation. And Ukraine's limits are equipment, not soldiers anyway.
So sending equipment is relatively cheap, enough for Ukrainians and enough to harm Russian imperialism long term.
Europe will send F16 and 400 modern MBT before sending soldiers.
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One facet of this whole affair I considered mentioning (but didn't, partly since it meant I managed to keep it within 10 000 words and didn't have to split posts) was that a few days ago Anton Monti, a Finnish-Italian writer who used to be a fairly notable figure in Finnish radical left (autonomist communist) circles in the early 2000s, made some bizarre tweets where, in addition to a strange attack on Estonians as "beneficiaries of Soviet Union", he said that Finland should - instead of sending tanks to Ukraine, which has been under discussion - "send tanks to Russia", ie. take back the areas lost in 1940/1944. Monti has gone through some ideological twists and turns, but taking a brazen irredentist nationalist position like this led to a fair amount of hooting and hollering, including accusations that this, too, was some sort of a Putinist plot (some magazines have suggested that Russians are trying to stoke take-back-Karelia discourses in Finland to create a potential casus belli). Oh, and he happens to be the partner of the deputy mayor of Helsinki, too...
This is indeed a frequently-made point about the most belligerent statements by public figures, like Monti's. "We can't allow fear of Russia make us engage in self-censorship like during the Cold War" and "It doesn't matter whether we hold our tongues or not, Russian propaganda is going to twist whatever statements we make to their liking anyway" are generally some of the replies.
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