The actual Atlantic crossing was 14 days

It’s possible to crew for others. When we sailed across the Atlantic ten years ago (on a sail training ship), one of the people on board was for the first time on a sailboat.

There’s plenty of ways to visit countries that won’t involve flying. Some of those quite CO2 neutral.

We were there a couple of weeks ago. Seems different neighbourhoods had different flags. We elected not to fly a courtesy flag on our boat as all the alternatives were partisan one way or another.

I’ve been to both Petsamo and Karelia, and trust me, we don’t want them back. To clean them up and bring them into modern standards of infrastructure would be ridiculously expensive. Not to mention the Russian population that has integrated in them over the last 80 years.