Finland’s alarm: Russia piles migrants along the border

Brussels – Russia attacks Europe with asylum seekers, massing migrants along the Russian-Finnish border, threatening to flood Finland and the EU with new flows. As the Kremlin moves troops and means into Ukraine, it simultaneously opens another front in the north to put the EU in trouble without the need to resort to force. “Since the fall, more than 1,300 people have arrived, who have been brought to the border,” Finnish Interior Minister Mari Rantanen said upon her arrival in Brussels for the council work Internal Affairs.

“But we must not only look at the numbers, we must look at what is behind these numbers: what happens, and how these people arrive at our borders.” The Helsinki government sees a clear and deliberate strategy, a Kremlin machination to divide the bloc of 27 with an always sensitive and divisive issue. A strategy already used by Alexsandr Lukashenko’s Belarus, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who already in the past tried to put pressure on the EU by massing migrants at the borders with Baltic countries.

History seems to be repeating itself along the over 1,300-kilometer Finnish-Russian border.  “Our eastern border is under pressure from Russia,” Rantanen reiterates. “We need to discuss this issue and figure out how to handle it in the future” because, he explains, it is about “protecting the Union as a whole and its external borders.” Hence, the call for “an EU-level mechanism” and the intention to continue to raise the issue and discuss it in the EU.