The government of Finland has decided to close the border with Russia for another month from December 15.
This is reported by the Finnish publication Yle.
Two days ago , the Finnish government agreed to open the Vaalimaa and Niirala border crossings for Russians for a month from December 14. However, today they decided to close them due to the large flow of asylum seekers.
According to Finnish Interior Minister Marie Rantanen, the closure of the border is necessary to control the situation, which poses a threat to national security.
"It became clear that two weeks of closed regime was not enough. It is obvious that the phenomenon of illegal entry takes place under the influence of another state and is connected with crime," Rantanen said.
She added that the situation will normalize only when the flow of people trying to enter the country illegally stops.
Today, at least 91 asylum seekers arrived at the newly opened checkpoints, 70 of them at the Niirala border crossing. The work of the checkpoint had to be suspended for an hour at 18:00 due to the large number of migrants — the border guards could not cope with the flow.
21 migrants arrived at the Vaalimaa checkpoint in a day, some of them citizens of Somalia and Syria.
What is happening on the Russian-Finnish border
In recent years, Finland has been preparing for the fact that Russia will send a large number of asylum seekers to the border. The Russians have already done this on the Finnish border during the migration crisis of 2015.
Last month, border guards began to report that an unusually large number of people who did not have entry documents were trying to enter Finland through the checkpoints on the southeastern border.
On November 15, the Prime Minister of Finland stated that Russia helps illegal migrants enter the country, including citizens of the Russian Federation, countries of the Middle East and Africa. According to him, Russian border guards are involved in this. Belarus also operates according to a similar scheme, pushing migrants to the borders with Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. Due to this surge in illegal migration, Finland decided to close border crossings.