A new front is opening in Europe’s illegal immigration crisis, with hundreds of Middle Eastern migrants from countries including Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen crossing into the European Union member-state of Finland from neighboring Russia.
Compared to the boat migrant crises facing EU border states such as Spain, Italy, and Greece, the scale of the Finnish crisis is currently small, involving only around 300 migrants. It could worsen rapidly, however, with a similar movement of African and Middle Eastern migrants towards Poland from Belarus, a Russian client state, rapidly escalating to involve thousands of would-be border crossers.
These migrants clashed with border guards, police, and soldiers deployed to stop them, and had to be physically repelled with water cannons.
Russia is accused of having orchestrated the sudden arrival of migrants on the Finnish border, as punishment for Finland’s decision to join NATO – and while Russia has denied these accusations, a Kremlin spokesman also commented it “deeply regret[s] that the leadership of Finland chose the path of deliberate distancing from the previously good nature of our bilateral relations.”
The Russo-Finnish frontier is 830 miles long, and the Finns, who only number around 5.5 million, likely have less capacity to police it than the U.S. does with respect to its 1,954-mile Mexican frontier.
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