Winter has suddenly come over Finland again.
The wind drives snowflakes in front of it, everything seems to be drowning in white-grey light.
It's April and Ilkka Tuomikko has put his fur hat on his bald head and put on his gloves and thick jacket.
It is on the Finnish border, on the other side is Russia.
Tuomikko manages the Nuijamaa border station in the far south-east of Finland.
He has been with the Finnish border guard for almost thirty years, here for three years.
He wants to show what it's like at the border, because politically, too, winter has set in again for relations with the neighbors.
Finland is now realigning its security policy, and even joining NATO in the summer is becoming increasingly likely.
Matthias Wysuwa
Political correspondent for northern Germany and Scandinavia based in Hamburg.
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At Tuomikko's border station you can see what's going on on this snowy day: almost nothing.
Tuomikko walks across the empty streets to a checkpoint, a car with Russian license plates pulls up.
That rarely happens here.
Otherwise there are only empty lanes, red traffic lights, snow.
The Finnish and European Union flags fly in front of a gray house.
There is no sign of the Russian border station, it is a few hundred meters away.
The proximity to the big neighbor is familiar to him, says Tuomikko, he has spent his whole life on the eastern border.
In Russia, however, he was only on business to talk to colleagues on the other side.
But they don't do that anymore.
The Nuijamaa border post was once bustling with life, going back and forth here.
Russian truck drivers rolled over the border, tourists from Finland and Russia had to be checked.
It's less than two hundred kilometers to St. Petersburg and a little more to Helsinki in the other direction.
Just a few years ago it was the largest border crossing between Finland and Russia, with a good three million controls a year.
Now there is silence.
That was the case, Tuomikko says, even before the war in Ukraine, because of the corona pandemic.
Russians needed a valid reason to still be allowed to enter the country, such as dual citizenship or a home in Finland.
At least the trucks are still rolling.
There are 800 to 1,000 border crossings today, says Tuomikko.
A few days later, that too is over.
Tuomikko marches through the snow in the manner of a Finn cliché: taciturn and calm.
War is always something very bad, he says.
"But here it's actually quite normal at work." Not much has changed.
One unit controls people and cars, one the green border around it.
Tuomikko does not reveal how many people work here.
Then he shows a yellow bus in front of the gray terminal that has come from Russia.
There are also four Ukrainians on the bus who are asking for protection in Finland.
That happens almost every day, says Tuomikko.
So something has changed in the past few weeks at his border station.