Finnish Foreign Minister Haavisto: Russians Traveling with a Tourist Visa Will be Denied Entry to Finland | Finland Today | News in English | finlandtoday.fi

Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto (the Greens) said in a press conference on Friday evening that the entry of Russians with a tourist visa will be denied.

“This includes people traveling with Schengen visas that have been granted earlier by Finland and those traveling with Schengen visas granted by other countries,” Haavisto said.

According to Haavisto, the new restrictions are likely to come into force in the following few days, possibly next week.

President Sauli Niinistö, who spoke in an interview with national broadcaster YLE, also on Friday, said that “the effort and purpose are to significantly reduce the number of people traveling to Finland from Russia.”

Earlier today, President Niinistö and the Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy (TP-UTVA) decided that the government “would issue a resolution placing significant restrictions on the issuing of visas to Russian citizens and on their entry into the country in order to prevent serious damage to Finland’s international position.”

Niinistö said that the decision by TP-UTVA to restrict entry from Russians was not difficult to make.

“The question of whether the decision was based on evaluating our comprehensive security, that was something we discussed,” Niinistö said.

Yesterday, about 6,470 Russians arrived in Finland via the Finnish-Russian land border, which is 1,340 kilometers long. (In comparison, last Thursday a week ago, about 2,900 Russians https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000009089157.html?share=ed54e6ee3fff90bc3da6200ec4505595″ data-type=”URL” data-id=”https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000009089157.html?share=ed54e6ee3fff90bc3da6200ec4505595″ target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>crossed the border to Finland. The traffic has grown by 107%.) The length of the car queues at the border inspection has been several hundred meters in the past few days.

It’s widely speculated that some Russians are fleeing the country to avoid having to go to war in Ukraine after Russian President Vladimir Putin in a troop call-up on Wednesday announced that 300,000 men from the reserve would receive orders to report for duty.