Finland has finished building a 200-kilometer (124-mile) barrier along its border with Russia, the Finnish public broadcaster YLE News reported.
The barrier includes a metal fence, an adjacent road, and a cleared strip stripped of forest, with surveillance cameras, lights, and loudspeakers mounted directly on the fence.
The project cost Finland 356 million euros to build, and maintaining it is expected to run 1.5 million euros a year.
The fence crosses 17 municipalities, stretching from Lapland to the coast of the Gulf of Finland, and runs through land owned by roughly 1,000 people. The state paid them a total of about 3 million euros in compensation.
Raimo Jokela, a landowner in the southern Finnish municipality of Virolahti, took the matter to court, arguing that the barrier had cut into his income from leasing farmland. He and his relatives asked the court to order the fence rerouted, but the court rejected their claim.
YLE News writes that the fence is meant to prevent illegal border crossings and so-called directed migration.
Finland first began discussing the project in the fall of 2022, after Vladimir Putin announced a mobilization and nearly 17,000 Russians entered the EU country in a single weekend. Construction began in the spring of 2023.
The Russian–Finnish border runs about 1,300 kilometers (808 miles) in total, and the completed fence covers scattered sections along its length.
In the fall of 2023, Finnish authorities closed the border with Russia amid a sharp increase in the number of foreigners trying to enter the country from Russia. According to data from Reuters, from August to December, 1,300 asylum seekers crossed the Russian border, most of them citizens of Syria, Somalia, and Yemen. Helsinki believes that Moscow deliberately created the migrant crisis by organizing their movement to the border. Russian authorities denied these accusations.
The Baltic states — Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia — are building or have already built barriers on their borders with Russia.
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