Finnish and Western popular historians have made much of the final Soviet attacks in the hours before the armistice took effect, often painting them as a form of war crime. While a valid point of view, these tales usually fail to mention that Finnish generals did the same thing. At Kuhmo in central Finland, the Soviet 54th Rifle Division and its attached units had been surrounded since late January. Finnish attacks on the "mottis" increased in late February, with the Red Army corps command claiming that chemical weapons had been used and begging permission to retaliate in kind. The Soviet command refused. With the war's end only hours away, Maj. Gen. Wiljo Tuompo ordered his North Karelian Group of detached battalions to make a major attack.

Its hard to find any military justification for Tuompo's attack - having identified an NKVD unit in the motti, the Finns attempted to slaughter its personnel before the armistice freed them to return to Soviet lines. Use of poison gas has never been proven, and the agents available in 1940 were usually ineffective in cold weather. It remains a wartime Soviet claim without evidence, from a system built on lies. Yet the vindictive nature of this attack in the final hours - which needlessly cost dozens of Finnish soldiers their lives - makes it hard to disregard out of hand. The NKVD men fought off the Finns with heavy casualties on both sides, and marched out of their motti with banners flying.