rolled the wrecked Soviet armored cars off the mountainside. The Soviet Union intervened again in the Xinjiang War (1937), invading with 5,000 troops and using planes with mustard gas. In late 1930s, Soviet Union was no longer satisfied with the status quo in its relations with independent countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania. This came as a result of a change in Soviet foreign policy. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave a great opportunity to recover the provinces of Imperial Russia lost during the chaos of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. As a result of this pact, on 1 September, the Germans invaded Poland from the west. When the Poles were close to defeat and the Polish government left the country, on 17 September the Red Army invaded Poland from the east to regain the territories populated mostly by ethnic Belarusians and Ukrainians. Next, Soviet Union sent ultimatums to the Baltic states and gained control in September and October. The Soviet Union had negotiated with the Finns for over a year, but the Finns refused Soviet demands. The Red Army launched the Winter War on November 30, 1939 with the goal of annexing Finland. Simultaneously, a puppet regime, called the Finnish Democratic Republic, was created by the Soviets. The initial period of the resulting war proved disastrous for the Soviet military. As a direct result of the Soviet aggression the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations on December 14, 1939. The Red Army had underestimated their opponent, and suffered a series of embarrassing defeats. However, in 1940 the Soviets reorganized their forces in a final offensive. Mannerheim, the Finnish commander, then advised his government to negotiate peace on Soviet terms. The Moscow Peace Treaty brought about an end to the war. The Finns retained their independence, but ceded 9% of Finnish territory to the Soviets. World War II The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 established a non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union with a secret protocol describing how Poland and the Baltic countries would be divided between them. In the invasion of Poland of 1939 the two powers invaded and partitioned Poland, and in June 1940 the Soviet Union also occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Red Army had little time to correct its numerous deficiencies before Nazi Germany and other Axis countries allied with it swept across the newly