What’s better than losing a war on one front? Losing a war on two fronts.
Of course, after seeing the Russian response to Ukraine’s NATO talk, it takes industrial grade stupid to announce your future NATO membership. Make your announcement when the deal is done and Putin has to add a confrontation with NATO into his calculus, not beforehand so he can get his invasion in first and NATO has to make the hard choice.
There’s that and the last time the Russians tried to take Finland they fared worse than they are in the Ukraine, with whole battalions wiped out in avalanches.