Unlike Soviet partisans elsewhere, they lacked continuously operating headquarters behind the enemy lines and often stayed there for just 15–20 days at a time.

The German military stationed in Lapland wanted to control the Finnish civilian population more strictly, conduct evacuations and issue German identification cards because they believed some civilians were giving information to the partisans, but the Finnish authorities rejected these plans.

[9] The raids on villages turned more brutal in mid-1944, when they were co-ordinated with the Soviet Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive[10] and incursions inside Finnish territory involved partisan detachments as large as 200 fighters during this time.

The Finnish anti-partisan unit Sau arrived on the scene nine hours after the attack and found dead bodies with the help of search dogs in a nearby forest.

According to the official Soviet report which falsified information, the partisans destroyed a "Finnish garrison" and killed 94 men.

Gennady Kupriyanov, who was leading the partisan activity, claimed in his report that the village was a "heavily fortified garrison".

This was in part due to the official Finnish position of friendly relations with the Soviet Union after the war, which even made them a sort of “forbidden topic”,[13] and some publishers avoided books about it.

[13] In Russia, the Soviet partisans in Finland are held in high regard as heroes of the Great Patriotic War.

[2] Olavi Alakulppi, a captain in the Finnish Army who witnessed the aftermath of the Seitajärvi raid, tried to influence a United Nations commission to investigate the Soviet partisan attacks in Finland as a war crime.

In 1960, the Soviet envoy to the United Nations strongly denied that they had committed crimes against civilian population and even questioned whether Alakulppi had actually served in the Finnish Army.

[19] In October 1998, Christian Democratic MP Päivi Räsänen submitted a parliamentary question asking the government how they would investigate the partisan war crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice.

The question was answered by the Minister for Foreign Affairs Tarja Halonen who stated that the investigation would require co-operation from Russia.

[20] After the parliamentary inquiry, the office of the Prosecutor General of Finland decided to review the issue, as murder does not expire under the Finnish law.

[18][22] The Finnish Parliament approved legislation which granted a sum of 1,500 euro for the victims of the partisan attacks in September 2003.

The compensation was granted to people whose illness had been caused by a partisan attack, including emotional distress, or if they had lost one or both parents.

[23][24] In November 2006, the Finnish Defence Forces declassified slightly over 300 war-time pictures that had been considered “politically delicate” or too brutal for a broad audience.