The 46 kilometers along a remote road in northeastern Finland reflects, almost like no other symbol, the deterioration of relations between Russia and the Nordic country.
They also vividly illustrate the transformation of the European security framework in the last year, shaken by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The track that leads through the infinite taiga to the Raja-Jooseppi border crossing is a white blanket on which today, in full tension with Moscow, vehicles of the security forces circulate almost exclusively.
A road, abandoned by snowplows, and some border facilities in which several million euros of European funds were invested precisely to favor these transits with Russia and to which less than 10 passengers arrive daily today.
The cranes will be back soon
but this time to start building a fence that constitutes the new border between NATO and Russia after Finland's accession to the Atlantic Alliance was formalized this week.
Just the opposite of what was intended when devising this infrastructure.
The Raja-Jooseppi border crossing is located in the most unpopulated area – and one of the coldest – in the entire European Union.
Located in the heart of the national park, immense pine and fir forests stretch out around it.
Thousands of square kilometers in which no one resides —the name comes from a hermit who lived in a cabin at the beginning of the last century—, where bears, wolves and wolverines impose their law and frost lasts from October to May.
Opened in 1967, its annual records reflect the opening period after the end of the Cold War, with a constant increase in traffic until 2014, which was cut short first by the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, then by the covid pandemic and finally by the invasion of Ukraine.
The Raja-Jooseppi road, in the middle of the taiga, at the end of March.
carlos torralba
The absence of vehicles and the accumulated snow offer the brand new facilities a semi-abandoned aspect.
Three months before the large-scale attack on Ukraine, the four lanes with covered roofs were inaugurated, with the intention of making inspections faster and more comfortable in temperatures that can reach 50 degrees below zero.
They have never been used simultaneously;
there are also no staff to examine more than one vehicle at the same time.
Mikael and Tapio, two young border guards who prefer not to give their last names, wait in the booth for the clock to strike 3:00 p.m.
It has been a "very quiet" day and it does not seem likely that anyone will show up in the 35 minutes remaining before the border post closes until nine in the morning the next day.
"It's more comfortable here than out there with the cold it's doing," says Mikael, who provokes a shy laugh from his partner, a few years his junior.
The more than 60 members of the border guard team stationed in Raja-Jooseppi, whose base is about six kilometers from Russian territory, patrol the entire area closest to the border with quads
.
and snowmobiles;
a strip of land off-limits to the public (unless a special permit is available).
In 2013, some 400 people crossed this post daily;
today, the average does not reach ten, and some days no one passes.
“Some are Russian on the way out, and Finns on the way back”, ironically Mikael, referring to citizens with dual nationality —allowed since 2003—;
about 30,000 in all of Finland, who can still travel from one country to another with hardly any restrictions.
With the consensus of all parliamentary groups, and on the proposal of the Finnish Border Guard, the construction of the fence on the eastern border was approved last October.
Sanna Marin, the prime minister —in office since last Thursday after resigning due to the recent electoral result— argued that it was necessary in view of “the new security situation” generated by the war in Ukraine.
The Social Democrat stressed that the main purpose of the wall will be prevention against "hybrid threats" from Russia, especially "the exploitation of mass migration."
A few months earlier, Finland began a historic turn by abandoning its neutrality and beginning the process of joining the Atlantic Alliance, which ended on Tuesday.
In February, the construction of three kilometers of fence began in the south, near the city of Imatra.
The pilot project is scheduled to end in June, but the final work, which will cover 15% of the 1,340 kilometers that separate Finland from its gigantic neighbor - the second longest border on the continent, after Russia and Ukraine - will not be completed until 2026. Most of the obstacles will be erected in the southernmost strip, but fences will be built around the eight border posts - the length of each section is confidential information - including those at Salla and Raja-Jooseppi, north of the Arctic Circle.
"Russia used [in 2015 and 2016] migrants as a weapon in that area of Lapland," Pekka Virkki, an analyst with the military magazine
Suomen Sotilas , says by phone.
.
"And the risk that Moscow will resort to mass migration again has always been latent," adds the expert, who considers that the fence will be above all "a symbol" of the new relationship with the Eurasian country.
At the end of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants crowded the southwestern borders of the EU, a few hundred sought refuge at the Storskog border post, the only one between Russia and Norway, inaugurating the so-called Arctic route.
After Oslo expressly modified its legislation to make it difficult to access asylum in the north of the country, after accumulating 5,600 applications, the images of exhausted migrants, on snowy roads on recently purchased very basic bicycles —Russia prohibits crossings on foot— , began to be seen in Salla and Raja-Jooseppi.
More than 1,600 refugees entered Finland that winter through the two northernmost crossings.
A group of refugees, in November 2015 at the Storskog border crossing, in Norway. JONATHAN NACKSTRAND (AFP)
The arrival of Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis in Finnish Lapland was cut short in March 2016 after the agreement in Moscow between Finnish President Sauli Niinistö and Vladimir Putin whereby the Raja-Jooseppi and Salla passes could only be used the following six months by Russian and Finnish citizens.
Shortly after Niinistö's visit – in office for a decade and one of the European leaders who has had the closest relationship with the Russian president – Putin declared that, when he looked at the border, he saw “Finns” on the other side, but that if Finland entered NATO, it would see “enemies”.
The future wall, which in total will add about 200 kilometers, will cost approximately 380 million euros.
A robust fence three meters high, topped with barbed wire, and equipped with night vision cameras, loudspeakers, spotlights, and a parallel road.
The work is in line with the walls that Poland and the Baltic countries have built —or are building— on their borders with Russia or with those of its ally Belarus.
Since 2020, the Belarusian regime has encouraged and facilitated the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants at the EU's external borders, in response to various sanctions imposed by Brussels.
The Finnish border authorities maintain that the wall is "necessary" to prevent "the instrumentalization of massive arrivals" and that no alternative is "more economical or more effective."
In July, reforms to the Border Guard Law were approved that allow the Government, in a crisis situation, to centralize the reception of asylum applications at a single border post.
Official documents mention that the wall will reinforce "regional security and prevent possible territorial annexations."
Virkki and other analysts consulted consider, however, that its usefulness at the military level will be "practically nil."
Finland took longer than Poland and the Baltic countries to approve the construction of their fences;
and it is the one that projects the works in the longest term.
Almost four years of work in which an attempt will be made to limit the impact on watercourses and animal crossings will be facilitated.
The instability of the terrain and the harsh, dark and long Finnish winter - in addition to the compulsory purchase procedures and the competitions for the award of the contracts - will also delay its conclusion.
The wall will reflect the definitive cooling of some ties that have been fostered and strengthened since the mid-1990s and that tried to resist the consequences of the annexation of Crimea and the pandemic.
“Relationships are frozen, but luckily they are not dead;
we can still maintain personal contact with our relatives, colleagues and friends in Russia,” says Olga Davydova-Minguet, a professor at the University of Eastern Finland, by phone.
The researcher, who has dedicated more than 20 years to studying the cross-border relationship between the two countries, admits, despite everything, the consequences that the restrictions derived from the war have had in different economic sectors, in the academic field and in personal ties of tens of thousands of citizens.
Davydova-Minguet, who emigrated in 1991 from the Russian city of Petrozavodsk (200 kilometers from the border), highlights the impact that restrictions on cross-border crossings have had on the almost 90,000 Russophones residing in Finland, most of them with relatives at the other side.
The changes are more evident in the south, in cities like Lappeenranta or Joensuu, where a significant portion of the population speak Russian as their mother tongue, or in small towns very close to the border where most businesses have closed due to the absence of tourists.
Jussi P. Laine, Professor of Human Geography, and Davydova's colleague at the University of Eastern Finland, flatly rejects the construction of the border fence.
"Multiple studies show that the costs of building walls are greater than their benefits," says the researcher, who specializes in mobility and cross-border security.
“The fence creates a false sense of security, and distracts people from the real reasons for insecurity,” Laine points out, adding that should Finland face episodes of mass migration, the obstacles will only cause “evaporation”. and reorganization into smaller groups that are less visible and more difficult to monitor.
"In most cases, the walls have not reduced the numbers of irregular crossings, they have only made them more dangerous and lethal," he says.
With Finland's entry into NATO, the Alliance has incorporated the member with the greatest military capabilities in the last two decades and has more than doubled its border with Russia.
A dividing line that stretches from the Arctic to Kaliningrad, the ends of which are very close to the Russian bases of the Northern Fleet and the Baltic Fleet.
More than 2,000 kilometers of borders in which walls reminiscent of the iron curtain —moved to the east— proliferate and that show the little hope of normalizing relations with Russia in the short or medium term.
A border that has been transformed in recent decades and that is closed to Russian tourists, except through the Storskog border crossing, the only one that since 1949 has separated the Atlantic Alliance from its main reason for being.
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