Finland’s entry into NATO has incorporated 1,340 kilometers of land border with Russia into the defensive alliance, a consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that Vladimir Putin did not count on. The expansion of the Atlantic Alliance places Finnish border towns in a new outpost situation, which in the case of Imatra, a city of 25,000 inhabitants in the southeast three kilometers from the dividing line, is even more notorious.
In this area of ​​dense fir forests, a three-meter-high fence has been built with great discretion since the beginning of March, the first step in a 200-kilometre barrier project to be completed in 2026. The fence is not for military purposes, but for security purposes. immigration containment, but it is containment based on the possibility of a hybrid threat: Moscow’s use of migration as a destabilizing factor.
It snowed hard in Imatra in the days around the recent elections in this Nordic country, where consensus on NATO and attitude towards Russia reign. “We have always been close to the border all our lives, crossing it daily and receiving Russians who came to sightsee or shop,” says Anna Helminen, president of the municipal council. “The total closure of the border due to the covid has prepared us for this situation, with the difference that we knew that the pandemic would end, and this, on the other hand, is definitive,†continues Helminen. Now there really is no movement across the two countries, neither here nor on the rest of the border.”
Convoys loaded with Russian wood for the factory of the Swedish-Finnish paper company Stora Enso arrived at the Imatra railway station, a stamp that has gone down in history. A new train was to leave from this same station to connect with Saint Petersburg, which is 220 kilometers away, a project that will no longer be produced. And 7 kilometers away by road is the Russian town of Svetogorsk, with 15,000 inhabitants, with which Imatra was twinned. Technically, it still is, but the links are broken. The capital of Finland, Helsinki, is 260 kilometers to the west of this remote location.
In Imatra two feelings coexist. On the one hand, the economic impact of the closure of the border hurts – it is estimated that the region is failing to enter a million euros a day – and neighbors who had friendly relations with Russians lament the break. “Some Russians bought flats here; now they cannot come or sell them because rubles are not accepted, and some do not pay the dues of the community of neighborsâ€, says Helminen. In this area, the paper and steel industries and the Border Guard – one of the main employers in the area – cushion the damage. But Russian tourism, which was important, no longer exists.
In 1772, Empress Catherine the Great of Russia visited the Imatrankoski rapids of the Vuoksi River as it passes through what is now Imatra, and made the site fashionable. In fact, it is considered that tourism in Finland as a concept was born here. The Empress stayed in a hotel that was later destroyed by fire and on which the current modernist Valtio hotel was built in 1903, with the air of a fairytale castle, the only architectural attraction of this city.
Now the rapids no longer flow daily, because a hydroelectric dam was built in 1928. The locks are opened to allow the natural spectacle in summer for tourist reasons or on special occasions such as Independence Day, December 6. On that date in 1917, the then Grand Duchy of Finland, dependent on Tsarist Russia, took advantage of the Bolshevik revolution to declare independence.
The other sentiment in Imatra, shared by many Finns, is how the fighting in Ukraine echoes the Winter War of 1939-1940, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland on Stalin’s decision and the Finnish army inflicted heavy damage on the invader, despite being outnumbered and outgunned. “It was also an unprovoked attack by a very large adversary against a smaller country, which resisted as the Ukrainians are now resisting; David against Goliathâ€, says Kalle Pakarinen, a specialist at the Imatra museum.
“Very close to here, there was fighting in the Winter War,†says Pakarinen, as we walk through the exhibition on the air battle of Ruokolahti, fought between Finnish and Soviet pilots on February 29, 1940. The Soviets had discovered the frozen lake in Finnish fighters landed – the planes were equipped with wooden skis – and they surprised and defeated them. Remains of the devices have been recovered in the area, which are exhibited here.
“The Winter War is part of the national identity, its memory has always been highly cultivated, both in research and in literature; and there is a continuing interest in military history,†explains Pakarinen. The Winter War lasted three and a half months, and Finland, which astonished the world with its resistance, finally had to agree to peace, ceding territory in the Karelia region to the USSR. He then tried to win it back in the less claimed Continuation War (1941-1944), in which he sided with Nazi Germany against the USSR, with the catastrophic result that Finland ultimately lost even more territory in the southeast and tarnished its reputation. The current Russian village of Svetogorsk was formerly Finnish.
Since last Tuesday, the day the Finnish flag was raised at the headquarters of the Atlantic Alliance in Brussels, Finnish border towns such as Imatra, which were already the external border of the European Union, have acquired a new dimension, although For the time being, there is no provision for the stationing of NATO troops on this new external border. “Despite the economic impact, Imatra’s residents, like the vast majority of Finns, understand the border closure and agree,” says Anna Helminen. The Russian aggression against Ukraine is simply unacceptable.”
