The administration did not encompass the territories ceded to the Soviet Union in the Moscow Peace Treaty and subsequently recaptured by the Finns during the summer offensive of 1941.

[2] During and after the Finnish Civil War, several voluntary expeditions were launched with the intended goal of liberating the Karelian "kindred people", without success.

[3] The resulting book Finnlands Lebensraum ("Finland's Living Space") was published in the autumn of 1941, and was intended to legitimize Finnish claims and actions to the international audience.

[3] A similar book by historian Jalmari Jaakkola, Die Ostfrage Finnlands ("Finland's Eastern Question") was published in the summer of the same year.

Kotilainen was followed by Colonel J. V. Arajuuri from 15 June 1942 to 19 August 1943, and finally by Col Olli Paloheimo who held the position to the end of the war.

[10] Members of the Academic Karelia Society (AKS), a Finno-Ugric activist organization, held a dominating role in the military administration.

[11] During the Continuation War the "liberation" of Eastern Karelia had become the main focus point of AKS activities, and its members were highly influential in choosing the policies of the military administration in accordance with the organization's "Greater Finland" ideology.

[11] The long-term goal of the military administration was to make it possible for Eastern Karelia to be permanently integrated to the Finnish state after the ultimate German victory over the Soviet Union.

[12] The notable exception is Petroskoi (Petrozavodsk), which was deemed as sounding too "Russian", and was renamed Äänislinna, a literal Finnish translation of the name Onegaborg used in the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius.

[14] The new name was tentatively suggested to be Vienanlinna ("Castle of Viena"), a continuation of several Finnish cities and towns ending in suffix -linna (e.g. Hämeenlinna, Savonlinna).

[16] The Finnish authorities further estimated that of the remaining 85,000, about half could be classified as "national"; that is, Karelians, Finns, Estonians, Ingrians, Vepsians and other smaller Finnic minorities considered "kindred peoples" (heimo).

[17] Ultimately, the division was based on ethnic principles (sometimes expressing somewhat pseudo-scientific anthropological theories), and thus monolingual Russian-speaking Karelians and children from multinational families were usually classified as "national".

[16][17] The long-term goal of this pursued policy was to expel the "non-national" part of the population to German-occupied Russia after the war had reached a victorious conclusion.

The exact border of the White Sea Isthmus was left undefined during the war, but Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO), held that Finland should annex the whole KFSSR.

[30] The most eastward suggestion discussed among the Finnish officer corps before the war drew the line from Nimenga in the Arkhangelsk Oblast to the Pudozhsky District on Lake Onega.

[33] Jalmari Jaakkola estimated in Die Ostfrage Finnlands that some 200,000 Russian had to be expelled from the region, leaving the peninsula with a population of c. 20,000 Finns, Samis and Karelians.