Morskaya Strelkovy) Brigades were brought to support the encircled 176th and 289th Rifle Divisions, the combined Soviet infantry strength in Ilomantsi was slightly higher than 20,000 men.

Fast-moving battalions from the Cavalry Brigade, experienced in forest warfare, drove through this area between lakes, as a wedge between the attacking Soviet 176th and 289th Rifle Divisions.

When it implemented the encirclements at Leminaho and the Lutikkavaara hill, the Uusimaa Dragoon Regiment attacked through Utrio and the River Ruukinpohja, with flanking from the Jaeger Battalion 1.

Two attacking Red Army divisions were decimated in this last major engagement on the Finnish front, before the armistice was concluded in early September 1944.

For instance, a Finnish guerrilla detachment led by the Knight of the Mannerheim Cross, Lieutenant Heikki Nykänen, destroyed a Soviet convoy of 30 trucks carrying artillery rounds to the battle scene.

[citation needed] The Finns had achieved victory, and the remnants of the two Red Army divisions had barely escaped destruction by breaking out from the encirclements.

The future President of Finland had witnessed this battle as a soldier in a reconnaissance company commanded by Captain Lauri Törni, a Finnish war hero and Knight of the Mannerheim Cross who later served in the USA as a Green Beret under the name Larry Thorne: In a speech on 4 September 1994, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the armistice ending the Finnish-Soviet hostilities, the Prime Minister of Finland Esko Aho declared: Media related to Battle of Ilomantsi at Wikimedia Commons