Finland has presented the plan to secure the border with Russia, which provides for a fence of 200 kilometers on the total 1,300 kilometers of its border, at a cost of around 380 million euros.
It will be a fence of more than three meters with barbed wire, night vision cameras, lights and loudspeakers, announced the manager of the project presented today by the Border Agency.
The construction involves three phases: First, a three-kilometre-long pilot fence will be built at the Imatra border crossing in March 2023.
Building on this experience, the second phase will see the construction of an additional 70 kilometers of fence in areas close to border crossings, starting at the end of 2023.
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Finland: border area with Russia
The government has already budgeted six million euros for the pilot project and 139 million for the second phase.
A final phase is scheduled for completion in 2025 or 2026, Brigadier General Jari Tolppanen specified: "It is one of the largest projects ever undertaken by the Border Guard," he added.
The project was announced weeks ago by Prime Minister Sanna Marin.
The Finnish government justified the construction of the fence with the need to control the increasing illegal crossings from Russia across a border of about 1,340 kilometers, the longest of any European Union country.
At the end of September, Finland approved the closure of its borders to Russian tourists, in full migratory escalation resulting from the partial mobilization announced days earlier by President Vladimir Putin, thus adding to the restrictions in this sense that the Baltic countries and Poland had already adopted in precedence.