Work began at the end of February, near the border post of Pelkola, three kilometers from Imatra, in the south-east of Finland, opposite the town of Svetogorsk, on the Russian side. First, the trees had to be cut down to open a passageway along the border. Then dig a trench, a few meters from the demarcation line, the route of which dates back to 1940, as indicated by the date engraved on the stones serving as a boundary between the two countries.
As soon as the diggers have finished preparing the ground, a fence three meters high, topped with sharp barbed wire and equipped with surveillance instruments, will be erected. By 2026, Finland plans to unroll around 200 km of fence in this way at the most sensitive points of its 1,340 km border, which constitutes, since its accession to NATO on April 4, the longest contact zone. between Russia and the Atlantic Alliance.
The decision was taken by Finnish MPs in October 2022 at the request of border guards. “For the moment, the situation is stable”, concedes Colonel Mika Rytkönen, commander of the southeastern district. Despite the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia, he still meets his counterpart, on the other side of the border, once a month, ” to discuss any incidents.”.
“The context has become unpredictable”
Last year, Russian border guards prevented 800 people from crossing without visas. The Finns, for their part, intercepted thirty people who entered their territory illegally. These figures are comparable to those of previous years, but “this could change quickly, because the context has become unpredictable”Remarque le Colonel Mika Rytkönen.
The primary function of the barrier will be to protect Finland against the massive influx of migrants, who could be used as part of a destabilization campaign, such as that carried out by Belarus against Poland in the fall of 2021. The authorities in Helsinki are convinced that Finland was the target of a similar operation in the winter of 2015, when 2,000 asylum seekers arrived in Lapland in a few weeks – some of them on bicycles.
“Already at that time, trust had been broken,” notes Hanna Smith, specialist in Russia. The construction of the fence shows, in her view, that Helsinki “is now preparing for any type of scenario”including ” at worst “, in the case where “no one would have control anymore” Russian side, even though the two countries are “in a phase of reassessment of their positions”.
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