Finland has begun building a 200-kilometre fence on a stretch of its border with Russia, officially to deploy better migration control, according to a bill passed into law in July last year in the heat of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Finland, in the process of joining NATO, has the longest external border with Russia in the EU: 1,340 kilometers, and the fence will be located along 200 kilometers in the southeast area, the most dense and wooded.
The fence will be a metal barrier three meters high, topped by barbed wire, with night vision cameras, spotlights and loudspeakers in the areas considered to be the most sensitive. Work began on Tuesday in a three-kilometre area near Imatra, a town of 26,000 in the southeast. It is about “logging in the forest, which will be followed by work to allow the construction of a road and the installation of a fence,” the Finnish Border Guard reported yesterday in a statement.
Currently, Finland’s borders are basically protected by wooden barriers, designed to prevent cattle from crossing the border. But the fear that Moscow could use migrants to exert geopolitical pressure -as Belarus did on the Polish border at the end of 2021-, now in the context of the war launched by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine, led the Finnish Parliament to modify in July the law on border guards in order to facilitate the construction of stronger barriers.
The 200-kilometre fence, which is expected to be completed in 2026, will cost 380 million euros. “Of course, we must be prepared for any contingency at the border,” Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said on Tuesday, also citing the immigration issue.
The leader spoke like this at the end of the first day of debate in the Finnish Parliament (Eduskunta) in Helsinki on joining NATO. The vote will take place today, Wednesday, around 1:00 p.m. But this approval is one more step towards definitive entry, for which the ratification of Hungary and Turkey -the only NATO countries that have not yet done so- and other subsequent steps such as the signature of the Finnish head of state, Sauli, are still pending. Niinistö, and the formal delivery to Washington of the instrument of accession.
Precisely on Tuesday, the secretary general of the Atlantic Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, was in Helsinki, who said that “the time has come” for Ankara and Budapest to ratify it because the two candidates, Finland and Sweden, “have fulfilled what they promised” to Turkey. Finland holds elections on April 2, and President Niinistö has made it clear that he would like to sign the membership before the election date.
Sweden and Finland, countries with a tradition of military neutrality, decided to jointly apply for NATO membership in the face of the Russian threat after Putin’s attack on Ukraine, but Sweden has more difficulty getting Turkey’s yes due to disagreements over handing over to Ankara of PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) militants residing in Sweden. The European Union considers the PKK a terrorist organization. According to a poll published at the beginning of February, a majority of Finns (53%) now want to join NATO without waiting for Sweden.
Estonia, Latvia and Poland have also increased the security of their borders with Russia, or plan to do so. Poland – which erected a wall on the border with Belarus due to the 2021 migration crisis – last November began to build a barrier on its border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, with the aim of shielding itself from a possible flow of migrants orchestrated by Russia like the one induced in 2021 by the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, a flow that still continues in small quantities.