Reaching Kittilä would provide access to better maintained Finnish road network as well as several roads to Finnish rear areas (Sortavala, Värtsilä and Matkaselkä).
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The frontline - up till July 1944 - had been following closely the banks of the River Svir, which flows from Lake Onega to Lake Ladoga.
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If the Red Army would not have been stopped here, the Finnish forces fighting on the Karelian Isthmus would have been left between two Soviet armies on the narrow Isthmus, in the area limited by the Gulf of Finland in the south, and Lake Ladoga in the north.
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The place is located in the Ladoga Karelia district, north of Lake Ladoga (in the southwestern corner of the Aunus Karelia frontier), in an area which belonged to Finland up to the end of the Continuation War (1944).
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